1986 | 105 MIN | Drama, War 

DIRECTOR IM Kwon-taek

CAST KIM Ji-mee, SHIN Seong-il, KIM Ji-young, HAN So-ryong

RELEASE DATE April 5, 1986

CONTACT Korean Film Archive

Tel +82 2 3153 2001 

Fax +82 2 3153 2080 

Email kofa@koreafilm.or.kr

For people living in Korea in the 1980s, one of the most memorable events of the decade was a series of special broadcasts on KBS in 1983, which sought to reunite families that had been separated by the Korean War. Some western viewers may recognize this from the end of JK YOUN’s melodrama blockbuster Ode to My Father (2014), in which HWANG Jung-min’s character reunites with his sister during the same telecast after having been torn apart as children during the Hungnam Evacuation of 1950. 

IM Kwon-taek’s Gilsotteum (1986), made in the wake of these broadcasts, draws its whole narrative around this telethon, and while it hints at joyous reunions between broken families, it probes a lot deeper into these separations and the social and ideological schisms they created. 

Like millions of others around the country, a well-to-do family in Busan sits around the TV set all day, tears rolling down their cheeks as they watch families separated by the war reunited during emotional programs broadcast on KBS. Hwa-young (KIM Ji-mee), the mother of the family, is bothered by something she sees and that night her husband tells her to go to the station in Seoul, to answer a question she’s been asking herself for 33 years.

Though hesitant, she sets out in her car and on the journey north recalls journeying with her family to the town of Gilsotteum after the liberation of Korea. A cholera outbreak soon claimed her parents and she went to live with her father’s friend. There she grew close with his son Dong-jin, and the two experienced young love until she became pregnant and was sent away.

One day, among the thousands of hopeful family members, gathered around the KBS station, Hwa-young meets Dong-jin (SHIN Seong-il), who is also now married, but confessed that he had always waited for her. Dong-jin tried to go to Hwa-young before giving birth, but missed her, as she had made her way down to him at the same time. He then tried to return but was caught up at the beginning of the Korean War. Hwa-young also lost track of her infant son during the war but in the present, she finds information that may lead her to him at the station. Hwa-young and Dong-jin go to meet Seok-cho, a young man who may be the son they lost over three decades earlier.

Seok-cho is hardly what Hwa-young might have hoped for. He is a poor, drunk brute who beats his wife. The chasm between her and this man is almost too much for her bear and leads to the film’s unexpected and devastating conclusion.

Among others, some of the questions IM’s film seems to pose are: do these families want to be reunited; and should they? The issues even go beyond the families themselves that are impacted by the war and the KBS broadcasts, as Hwa-young’s reticence to travel to the station and her coolness towards the man who may be her son appear to allegorize bitter aspects of Korea’s modern history. 

The Korean War, along with the Japanese Colonial Era that preceded it and the military regime that followed (and was still ongoing at the time the film was made) fractured the country in many ways. People died and families were separated, but the deep ideological rifts of the nation can’t be healed by nostalgia. The past and the present are no longer the same things.

A few months before reuniting on the classic Ticket (1986), IM Kwon-taek and star KIM Ji-mee collaborated on the equally impressive Gilsotteum. Like Ticket, this earlier film also included a lot of research, as various families reunited by the telethon were interviewed while the script was being written.

Following the barren images of his opening credits, the film starts modestly, but once Hwa-young leaves the comfort of her home, wistful, wail-like music seeps into the soundtrack. The foreboding tone of her journey to Seoul drives her to dark memories of her past. IM smoothly transitions between the past and present and stages steadily larger scenes as we go deeper into the story, first with the busy scene outside the telethon station, and then with dramatic images of the Korean War.

A deceptively grand story that tackles complicated questions the love and loyalty and home and country, Gilsotteum is a standout of 1980s Korean cinema.