Beast of Me
Soni KUM
- Japan
- 2005
- 18min
- 15 +
- DCP
- color
KP
Synopsis
Today 152,900 North Korean refugees live in Japan as a result of Japanese colonialism. It is mandatory for the school girls in North Korean schools to wear traditional Korean dress as a uniform. The embodiment of anti-colonial nationalism takes form in this dress. Whenever anti-North Korean sentiment arise in Japan, it results as the physical violence targeted at the girls wearing this Korean dress in the streets of Tokyo. why only female students have to wear Korean dress for resistance? Why we North Korean girls are the target of the violence due to the political conflict between the nations?
Review
The short story Beast of Me, a text created together with Foreign Sky, shows a collage of images and sounds in which the author's voice is superimposed in multiple overlapping images. The title Beast of Me is an English translation of a phrase from Yu Chi-hwan’s “Song-ga (1939)”, and what is interesting is that a part of this poem was translated into Japanese and appeared as a line by a Korean 'sister' in Nagisa Oshima’s film “Death by Hanging (1968)”, which then was translated into English by the author and used as the narration of this film. The film openly reveals the various processes of quotation and translation and looks at the author's body as a woman which cannot be expressed in a single image and language in the overlapping of different languages, histories, and images.
Director
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Soni KUM
Soni Kum is a multimedia artist who works in film and video, installation, performance. Her work has been featured in art spaces and film festivals around the world such as Japan, Korea, Brazil, Germany and UK.