Global solidarity between Gwangju and Buenos Aires: Good Light, Good Air (2021)

ABSTRACT This paper examines the documentary Good Light, Good Air (Joheun Bit Joheun Gonggi, dir. Im Heung-soon, 2021), which deals with two different massacres in Gwangju, South Korea and Buenos Aires, Argentina. The film focuses on people who have both witnessed and survived state violence, and examines how its treatment of the past accelerates alternative forms of historicizing. The film employs a unique archival approach to acquire, classify, and preserve the materials left behind by the uprisings against state violence while fostering the production of social knowledge that redefines what is known and what is knowable. Good Light, Good Air brings together two cities’ responses to traumatic events, drawing on cinematic strategies, such as juxtaposing stillness (photography) and motion (moving image), and mimetic methods that filmmaker Im uses to ‘transcribe’ what the interviewees are describing. In so doing, it suggests strategies for promoting global solidarity that are based on historical struggles against state violence by simultaneously exploring both traumatized personal histories and shared traumatic events.