The threat of weapons of mass destruction, ones that we definitely know exist, has raised the profile of North Korea, but the Korean peninsula remains a miniscule blip in the everyday consciousness of Americans. The TV series "M*A*S*H" raised American awareness, but it still is largely a forgotten war, even in South Korea.
Korean director Kang Je-gyu, whose "Tae Guk Gi" broke South Korean box office records, doesn't want Koreans to forget.
Answering questions via email and through a translator, Kang commented, "I had a chance to watch a documentary about the Korean War and then I realized how badly forgotten the war was. The Korean War was a very unique civil war because at the end, it somehow developed into an international war, yet it's forgotten."
At the end of World War II in 1945, the US and the Soviet Union agreed to have two separate governments for North and South Korea to replace Japanese colonial rule. But on June 25, 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea. UN troops joined the war and pushed the North Koreans back to the border of China. Then China entered the war; and in 1953, a truce divided North and South Korea at the 38th parallel.
Tae Guk Gi is the name of South Korea's national flag. In Kang's film, the tragedy of Korea is shown through the relationship between two brothers. The older brother, Jin-Tae (Jang Dong-Gun), works as a shoeshine to help put his younger brother, Jin-Seok (Won-Bin) through school. Their widowed mother runs a noodle shop along with Jin-Tai's fiancÈe, Young-Shin (Lee Eun-Joo). When Jin-Seok is drafted, Jin-Tae joins to protect him.
"My initial intentions were not about sending out a message of anti-war or anything political," Kang stated. "I just wanted to tell a story about how people are affected through a course of a war. I wanted to show [that] although war starts out by a few people's decisions, people who struggle in the middle of it are not the ones who made the decisions, but people who don't even know what they are fighting for. Parents, brothers and sisters and sons and daughters who have to sacrifice themselves for the thought and goals they are not very sure about. I think that's the truth of a war for many people."
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