Barbara Wurm: Many of your films focus on democratic activism and historical political questions. So does MY NAME, which weaves the issue of the April Third Incident of 1948 into the drama. Do you have any kind of biographical relation to this event?
Chung Ji-young: Rather than being based on my own personal, autobiographical experiences, my films are grounded in events that many people in the society I live in have experienced, are experiencing, or may experience in the future. Through my work, I’m trying to take a closer look at what those experiences mean to us today, and how they continue to affect our lives. The project originally began as a screenplay that won an open call organised by the Jeju April 3 Peace Foundation. In other words, I didn’t originally plan to make a film about these events someday. Someone brought me the material, and I thought I could approach this story from a different, unique perspective. So I decided to take on this project. Through many revisions, it gradually absorbed my own experiences, reflections, and awareness. MY NAME is a film inspired by events experienced by my seniors (the generation of my grandmother through the April 3 Incident) and by my juniors (my grandson’s generation through school violence). The incident is something that, for a long time, Koreans avoided talking about because of the deep-rooted so called ‘red complex’ – a strong fear and rejection of communism that still hasn’t been fully overcome. The incident only began to be openly discussed around 1998, which is also the period when the film portrays school violence. What I wanted to focus on instead was the collective violence of April 3 and the trauma it left behind. In particular, I felt the story could carry deeper meaning since Jeong-sun, who raises Young-oak, suffers from trauma not only as a victim, but also as someone who becomes a perpetrator.
BW: Could you explain the importance of the April 3 Incident in the history of Korea and maybe Asia for a European audience and how it is remembered today?
CJY: The year 1998, which runs through the entire film, was a time when the Jeju April 3 Incident was being newly illuminated. Before that, no one in the state government had been willing to address it. The incident itself took place on Jeju Island, in the aftermath of Korea’s liberation from Japanese rule in 1945. Following liberation, Korea was divided and occupied by the United States in the south and the Soviet Union in the north, during the process of establishing separate governments in each region. Between 1947 and 1954, an estimated 30,000 people – around one tenth of Jeju’s population at the time – were killed as a result of what is now widely recognised as state violence. It was a devastating tragedy. April 3 remained largely suppressed for decades. In 1978, novelist Hyun Ki-young published Uncle Suni, and was subsequently imprisoned for violating the National Security Law. Since then, the incident has been taken up by many artists in different forms and mediums, gradually breaking the long silence. More recently, it has begun to gain wider international recognition through ‘I Do Not Bid Farewell’ by Han Kang, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024. It’s been about 20 years since we started learning about it, but even now, many South Korean citizens still don’t know much about it.
Fabian Tietke: Let’s talk about the narrative structure of the film. You give us this couple of a grandmother and her grandson trapped in between two poles – on the one hand, history and on the other hand, the high school with these bullies and the corrupt teacher. What attracted you to this kind of structure?
CJY: Well, that’s my grandmother’s experience from 1948, or rather, 1949, that even in small acts of violence, that mechanism of violence operates. As for the structure, I usually hesitate to answer questions like this directly, because the director’s explanation can end up limiting the audience’s interpretation or imagination. But I had three main intentions for this structure: First, I hoped that the depiction of school violence would act as a kind of buffer for the extreme violence of the April 3 Incident, which is revealed towards the end of the film. At the same time, it works as a device that allows the audience to anticipate that larger, more terrifying violence. While the mother (grandmother) travels back in time to recover a childhood she has lost in her memory, the son (grandson), regardless of his own intentions, is gradually drawn into school violence. Even though the violence of April 3 is not shown directly at this stage, the audience slowly becomes accustomed to violence and begins to sense that the mother’s lost past is deeply connected to it. Second, even if a collective violence from the past seems to have been resolved and erased over time, small traces of that violence are often inherited within the community that experienced it. The students’ ritual of slapping each other is an echo – transformed in form and meaning – of the forced slapping imposed on villagers by the Northwest Youth League during April 3. Third, this kind of collective violence, regardless of its scale, usually occurs when a powerful external force enters a peaceful community and imposes a new order. Peace is broken, conflict emerges, tensions intensify, and violence begins. It is one example of the mechanism through which the imposition of a new order turns into collective violence. After the violence subsides, those who caused or carried it out often continue to enjoy the benefits of being in power. While they evade or nullify responsibility, those who remain are left to carry the wounds and try to hold each other together. Structurally, because Jeong-sun’s childhood memories alone cannot depict the causes and processes of the April 3 violence, I chose to let the audience infer those processes through the trajectory of school violence instead.
What I consciously wanted to do was to explore the mechanism of violence.
FT: On the contemporary level, you have a young man with a name that is portrayed as being feminine or a name with feminine connotations in a boy’s high school full of bullies. This is contrasted with a very tender relationship between the mother-grandmother. How important is the tenderness between the grandmother and the grandson?
CJY: I don’t know if that’s something embedded in the director’s unconscious. When I say that I did not portray violence in this film as something tied to masculinity, I mean that it was not something I consciously intended or set out to do. However, looking back, I can’t help but wonder whether my unconscious may have been thinking about violence in masculine terms… the fact that the film deals with violence among male students; that during April 3, members of the Northwest Youth League gathered villagers and forced only the men – not the women – to slap each other; and that the grandson, who is originally gentle by nature, has a female name, and even after experiencing collective violence, wishes to keep that female name he once wanted to change. Taken together, these elements suggest that the association between violence and masculinity may have been working beneath the surface. What I consciously wanted to do was to explore the mechanism of violence. And since I’m introducing it, the device that connects the school violence to the later, actual violence is this new kid. The friend who brought in the school violence is a new kid who just transferred there from somewhere else. Just as the warm, affectionate relationship Jeong-sun remembers from her childhood with her friend comes to symbolise peace, the relationship between Jeong-sun and Young-ok is also tender and calm. And just as that peace in the past is shattered by external violence, leaving Jeong-sun wounded, Young-ok’s friendship is likewise broken and hurt by violence imposed from outside. Similarly, the violence that erupted within South Korea started because the United States came to Korea to reinforce their ideology and implant that anti-communist ideology. That’s the violence that began. That’s the connection I made. BW: What about the importance of the flashback as a cinematic tool in your work in general, but especially in this film? What draws you to combining different time levels? CJY: Generally, flashbacks are used in my films because I’m very interested in how we view past events from the present perspective. And I find flashbacks to be a very effective way of tracing the meaning past events hold in the present, and how they continue to shape and influence it. In MY NAME, in particular, I use a double flashback structure: one that looks back on 1998 from the present, and another that moves from 1998 further back to 1949. The flashbacks from the present bring together the wounds of school violence in 1998 and the wounds of the April 3 Incident in 1949, asking what violence truly is and how such scars might be confronted and overcome. The flashbacks from 1998, on the other hand, function as a journey further into the past, recalling the modern history of violence in South Korea and questioning what the violence of April 3 looked like in its original form – and why it was so long hidden and suppressed.
BW: How do individual trauma and collective trauma relate in your films?
CJY: The trauma in this film is firstly the female protagonist’s personal trauma, right? But this trauma isn’t just hers alone. It’s shared by all those who died back then, those who survived, and the families of the survivors. That’s why they’re operating a trauma centre on Jeju Island now. Even though they’ve lived long lives, there are still many grandmothers and grandfathers suffering from that trauma. Moreover, what’s crucial is knowing that it’s not just the victims who suffer trauma. The perpetrators suffer it too. Because it was violence imposed from outside, not violence they chose to inflict themselves. They inevitably share that trauma. Right now, perpetrators and victims live together on Jeju Island. That’s what makes the trauma even more severe.
FT: I would like to go back to the contemporary level and ask about the role of the grandmother. Why was it important to you that she is portrayed as not conforming to society’s expectations of her?
CJY: Not portraying Jeong-sun (the grandmother) as the kind of elderly woman society typically expects plays a crucial role in sustaining the film’s themes. A conservative society demands conformity not only from Jeong-sun, but from everyone. Yet Jeong-sun does not easily accept those social expectations. To be honest, as a director, I feel that part of my own character may be reflected in her. On a deeper level, however, my intention was to use Jeong-sun as a metaphor for South Korea itself. After liberation from Japanese rule, South Korea has gone through eighty years of turbulent modern history. It carries a body and mind full of wounds, and it still holds unresolved questions, unable to fully escape an outdated ‘red complex’. In that sense, Jeong-sun in MY NAME could be seen, from a conservative viewpoint, as a progressive figure – someone who persistently asks ‘why?’ and ‘how?’
BW: I would like to learn more about the choices regarding the cast. You have a very experienced actress, Yeom Hye-ran, who we also know from films like NO OTHER CHOICE, as the mother/grandmother Jeong-sun, and we have the rising star, Shin Woo-bin as Young-oak. Why did you choose this actress and this actor for the main roles?
CJY: I had worked with Yeom Hye-ran on a previous project and after finishing that film, she asked me to cast her in my next one. So both Yeom Hye-ran and I were very lucky to cast her in this film. As for Shin Woo-bin, before doing this project, he was already on the fast track to stardom. Of course, he was cast as the lead, not a supporting role. And we found a lot of new talent. We auditioned among the newcomers. Except for the actor who plays the bully, they’re all new talent.
FT: How was it working with these two generations of actors and actresses?
CJY: I usually get along well with young people and spend a lot of time with them. On purpose, because I think it’s difficult to make movies without understanding the current generation. Because of that, I don’t feel a generational gap when working with Yeom Hye-ran, and I don’t find it particularly difficult to communicate or find rhythm with younger actors either. I try to understand their sensibilities, observe their culture, and sometimes enjoy it together with them. If I approach them as a director who feels approachable and comfortable, communication naturally follows. With Yeom Hye-ran, I can be a good senior; with younger actors, I can be a good uncle. When you take that approach, communication becomes much easier. Any sense of ‘authority’ as a director should be thrown in the trash. The title ‘director’ already carries more than enough authority on its own.
BW: Can you talk a little about the music in MY NAME?
CJY: I personally chose that music, with the agreement of the music director. In Jeong-sun’s childhood, amid the constant anxiety caused by the sound of gunfire, the unfamiliar, sorrowful English voice and its repetitive melody drifting from the radio in a wealthier friend’s house would have left a deep impression on her. ‘Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child’ is an African American spiritual that pre-dates the abolition of slavery, a song filled with the suffering of Black Americans and their longing for freedom. The emotional core of the song is not so different from what the people of Jeju must have felt during April 3. Moreover, the lyrics almost sound as if they are singing about a divided Korea. That feeling of sometimes being like a child who has lost their mother overlaps with the pain of living as a people who, at times, feel they have lost their country and are forced to live split in two. Although it is a foreign song, I felt it matched both the historical atmosphere of 1949 and the needs of the narrative. The fact that it would not raise copyright issues was also a practical factor that supported the decision.
BW: How would you describe your own role in the context of the current Korean cinema?
CJY: Well, I’m the oldest director currently active in Korea, you see. But then, many people say to me, ‘Oh, you’re Korea’s Ken Loach?’ But honestly, that’s too much praise for me. Because I think of myself as a missed artist, a director who makes popular films. Yet the reason people in Korea call me ‘Korea’s Ken Loach’ is because the subjects and themes I tackle align with Ken Loach’s work.
BW: How do you see this kind of cinema in the context of the big genre move of Korean cinema, and at the same time, the big importance of individual little independent filmmakers?
CJY: If I set aside my earliest works and a few films like BLACK JACK, and look at the rest, it seems that my films weave through Korea’s modern history like warp and weft. With each project, I kept asking the same question: ‘Why are we here, and how did we come to stand where we are today?’ That question inevitably required me to move back and forth between the present and the past, tracing causes and consequences. In doing so, fragments of the turbulent political history of the 80 years since liberation naturally found their way into my films. That political dimension of my work effectively created an eight-year gap between NAMYEONG-DONG 1985 (NATIONAL SECURITY, 2012) and BLACK MONEY (2019). Those eight years coincided with a period when I was labelled as being on a so-called ‘blacklist’ by political authorities and was consequently shunned by investors. At the time, simply to make a living, I even tried developing melodramas, but no matter the genre, projects bearing my name failed to pass investment evaluations. It’s also worth noting that I was only able to make NORTH KOREAN PARTISAN IN SOUTH KOREA (1990) thanks to the victory of the June Democratic Uprising in 1987. Looking at how my filmmaking tendencies took shape after that, it’s clear that my cinematic identity was not formed by my own authorial consciousness alone. Rather, it emerged through an ongoing interaction in which that consciousness was sometimes challenged, sometimes supported, with external circumstances either enabling or pushing it forward.
BW: Is this also why you didn’t make any films between 1998 and 2011?
CJY: Back then I was preparing a film about a figure from Korea’s past, specifically the Japanese colonial era. This person went to China to join the independence movement, started as an anarchist, then became a communist, and later transformed into an internationalist before being executed by the Chinese Communist Party. It’s based on an existing work – a book called ‘Song of Ariran’ written by a journalist named Nym Wales. The protagonist is a man named Kim San who died young, at 37, while engaged in revolutionary activities in China. There’s this original work written by an American journalist [Helen Foster Snow] about his story. Preparing to make that into a film took a very long time. We travelled to China three times for it, and despite all that effort, we ultimately couldn’t make it because the Chinese censorship authorities require all films shot in China to be censored before release. We constantly communicated with the Chinese censorship authorities and the Party. How could it possibly pass? But in the end, it didn’t pass. Later, I found out that films depicting the Chinese Revolution cannot be made by private companies, by private directors. Films made by the Chinese government are fine, but private companies, private directors, cannot make such films. So, ultimately, because of that, after preparing this project for eight years, I gave up. People thought I was doing other things at that time, but I was actually continuing to prepare the film.
FT: How common is an approach such as yours to combine a popular form and political content in Korean film?
CJY: The films I make, the subjects or themes I choose, aren’t really preferred by the general public. So, how do I bring this story I’ve chosen closer to the general public? I don’t want to make films that, in my terms, only a few intellectuals or connoisseurs watch and find satisfying. I want to make films that the general public watches, shares and engages in. That’s also why I describe myself as a filmmaker who makes popular cinema. I don’t like ‘a commercial film director’, a label I’ve never felt comfortable with. The subjects and themes I choose only truly have value when they are shared with a broad audience. Because of my desire to engage a large audience with stories they may initially resist, the process is never easy. From the screenplay stage through financing, production, and exhibition, it is always a difficult journey. MY NAME, as well as UNBOWED (2011) and Unbowed and NAMYEONG-DONG 1985, were all films that could not rely on conventional commercial investment. Still, seen from that perspective, the fact that I am still able to make films at all means that I am, in many ways, a very fortunate director.
