Part of ICA Summer International Film Festival 2008: "TRANSNATIONAL JOURNEYS".
Stanford's Division of International, Comparative & Area Studies is pleased to present its summer international film festival. This summer's festival highlights five films that depict a variety of people making transnational journeys around the globe. Some test fate as they pursue a better life or search for the truth, while others are swept away by impersonal global forces to alien places where they must reconstruct their lives anew. The festival will bring a human face to various cultures and peoples from around the globe as we witness the ins and outs of human lives traversing international boundaries.
The films will be introduced by scholars with expertise in the region depicted in the film. A question-and-answer session will follow each film.
KORYO SARAM: THE UNRELIABLE PEOPLE
In English, Korean, and Kazakh with English subtitles
Introduced by Steven Lee, Acting Assistant Professor of English,
University of California, Berkeley
In 1937, Stalin began a campaign of massive ethnic cleansing and forcibly deported everyone of Korean origin living in the coastal provinces of the Far East Russia near the border of North Korea to the unsettled steppe country of Central Asia 3700 miles away. This story of 180,000 Koreans who became political pawns during the Great Terror is the central focus of this film.
KORYO SARAM (the Soviet Korean phrase for Korean person) tells the harrowing saga of survival in the open steppe country and the sweep of Soviet history through the eyes of these deported Koreans, who were designated by Stalin as an "unreliable people" and enemies of the state. Through recently uncovered archival footage and new interviews, the film follows the deportees' history of integrating into the Soviet system while working under punishing conditions in Kazakhstan, a country which became a concentration camp of exiled people from throughout the Soviet Union.
Today, in the context of Kazakhstan's recent emergence as a rapidly modernizing, independent state, the story of the Kazakhstani-Koreans situated within this ethnically diverse country has resonance with the experience of many Americans and how they have assimilated to form new cultures in our world of increasingly displaced people.