In Liberation Village: the production of cinematic space for early North Korean refugees

The Golden Age of South Korean cinema was served a healthy dose of social realism soon after the April Revolution of 1960 with such outstanding films as Kang Dae-jin’s Mr. Park and A Coachman, Yu Hyun-mok’s Aimless Bullet, and Kim Su-yong’s Kinship. They not only shared the realistic portrayals of the poor and working class, but also the particular locale, Haebangchon (Liberation Village). Haebangchon was a wretched slum of Seoul where the early refugee population from North Korea (wollammin) had been concentrated since Liberation, hence the name. Relying on Henri Lefebvre’s theory of social production of space, I explain why this refugee space was such a focus of cinematic attention during the brief period of social realism. While wollammin became assimilated into mainstream South Korean society and the old Haebangchon shantytown mostly disappeared, the wollammin theme subsisted. Anticommunist films of the 1970s celebrated North Korean refugee vigilantes as national heroes, whereas the critical realism of the 1980s took pity on the wollammin experiences of poverty and discrimination. As the new century arrived, Haebangchon made a couple of brief, unexpected returns to Korean cinema, exposing an ongoing spatial transition that might possibly lead to a new kind of refugee space.