Kim-Gun screening with Q&A

This screening is part of the film screening series, Cinematic Witnesses: Documenting Figures of Resistance in East Asian Democracies, a response to the martial law declaration and the ongoing political crisis in Korea since December 2024.

Kim-Gun (Kang Sang-Woo, dir., 2019) documents the search for a figure who eludes both personal and state identification. The figure of Kim-Gun is pictured several times riding on a tank during the Gwangju Uprising in May of 1980 but never identified fully. Years later this figure was labelled by right wing academics as a North Korean militant and therefore evidence of the uprising’s North Korean origins. This leads the filmmakers on a journey to discover the “true” identity of Kim-Gun. This journey brings them to the participants of the uprising and resurfaces their memories leading to discoveries of collectivity, struggle, and violence far beyond the identity of the man on the tank.

Discussant: Michelle Cho (Assistant Professor, East Asian Studies)

Moderator: Eilis Price-Peyroux (Ph.D. Student, East Asian Studies)