Affirmative Transnationalism in Recent Korean Documentary Cinema: The Works of Oh Minwook and Im Heung-soon

Abstract

This paper examines the documentary works of two South Korean artist-filmmakers—Oh Minwook and Im Heung-soon—through the prism of what Mette Hjort (2009) has called “affirmative transnationalism”, a mode of transnational filmmaking that involves cross-border collaboration inspired by the concept of cultural affinity or similarity. In Letters to Buriram (Haehyŏp, 2019), Oh combines a poetic travelogue style reminiscent of Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1982) with the epistolary mode of narration enacted by Taiwanese woman artist, to offer an experimental reflection on the transnational traumatic impacts of Cold War violence on the landscape of South Korea, Taiwan and Japan. Im’s affective transnationalism is made visible in multiscreen documentary installations such as Reincarnation (Hwansaeng, 2015) and The Waves (P’ado, 2022), both of which interweave a rich set of parallels between subjects in different parts of Asia (South Korea, Vietnam, Iran) who endeavour to question the violence they suffered and reclaim their contested memory of it. All these cases demonstrate that the post-activist documentary in the 21st-century South Korea offers new, transnational and multidimensional perspectives on memories of regional violence by expanding its national and aesthetic boundaries.