Movie Minorities

Transnational Rights Advocacy and South Korean Cinema

Hye Seung Chung, David Scott Diffrient

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781978809642
  9781978809659
• eBook ISBN:
  9781978809680
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Rights advocacy has become a prominent facet of South Korea's increasingly transnational motion picture output, especially following the 1998 presidential inauguration of Kim Dae-jung, a former political prisoner and victim of human rights abuses who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000. Today it is not unusual to see a big-budget production about the pursuit of social justice or the protection of civil liberties contending for the top spot at the box office. With that cultural shift has come a diversification of film subjects, which range from undocumented workers' rights to the sexual harassment experienced by women to high-school bullying to the struggles among people with disabilities to gain inclusion within a society that has transformed significantly since winning democratic freedoms three decades ago. Combining in-depth textual analyses of films such as Bleak Night, Okja, Planet of Snail, Repatriation, and Silenced with broader historical contextualization, Movie Minorities offers the first English-language study of South Korean cinema's role in helping to galvanize activist social movements across several identity-based categories.
 

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• A Note on the Text
• Introduction: “I Am a Human Being”: The Question of Rights in South Korean Cinema
• Part I. Institutional Foundations and Formal Structures
• Part II. Movie Minors and Minor Cinemas
• Part III. Disability Rights in Mainstream and Minoritarian Filmmaking
• Part IV. Representing Prisoners of the North and South
• Part V. Migrant Worker Rights in Hybrid Documentaries
• Part VI. Nonhuman Rights in a Posthuman World
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Authors