During the Japanese colonial period, poor Joseon people migrated to the Maritime Province of Siberia to live and they called themselves as ‘Koryoin’ in the community they built. In 1930s, they were forced to move into the Central Asia as a minority race policy of the former Soviet Union and lived anyway as they dug underground caves in that wilderness. To this unfortunate Koryoin who were expelled from where they migrated from their hometown, one festive day comes like a welcome rain when ‘Koryo Theater’, the Koryoin chorus of Kazakhstan, comes to town.

Two divas of the ‘Koryo Theater’, Bang Tamara and Lee Ham-deok. The film shows the past and the present of Koryo by interviews with Bang Tamara and her daughters as well as the people knowing the late Lee ham-deok, who is remembered as the ‘first Chunhyang’ and ‘the first female people’s actor’.

It is fair to say that the history of Koryoin is the history of migration. Koryo Theater was a nomad itself as they made dances and songs to comfort them and wandered around the former Soviet Union. The camera wandering around the Central Asia to hear memories of two divas seems to be representation of the Koryo Theater itself.

The interviews with people remembering two divas and their singing have another story can’t be replaced by idiomatic expresseions such as ‘we are the Korean people’ although said in Korean. The life of wandering Koryoin in Central Asia and their ‘Koryo Arirang’ singing are not the arirang we are familiar with, it is totally different, the sound of nomad. [Lee Young-ju]​