Gwangju and the 1980s film movement: the representation of the minjung in Oh! My Dream Country

ABSTRACT This article explores early cinematic representations of the Gwangju Uprising in the films The Announcement of Mr. Kant (1987, Kim Tae-yeong), Hwangmuji (1988, Kim Tae-yeong), and Oh! My Dream Country (1989, Jangsan-gotmae), with particular attention paid to the final film. These three 16 mm fiction works are all ‘independent films’ made within the context of the emancipator activism of the minjung movement in the 1980s South Korea. This study demonstrates how these three films can be categorized as so called ‘minjung films’ that refer to the ‘independent’ works devoted to the ‘independence’ of the people from the authoritarian South Korean state and the political interference of the United States. I also analyse how Oh! My Dream Country is particularly representative of minjung cinema when considering the collaborative mode in which it was produced and its treatment of the Gwangju Uprising as a pro-democracy struggle. Finally, through a textual analysis of Oh! My Dream Country, I reassess the historical significances of these three early Gwangju films through the lens of gender. I discuss how the minjung, particularly in Gwangju, were problematically feminized as collective victims in the 1980s by the discourse of anti-American nationalism, which was primarily constructed by male intellectuals.