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A small miracle took place in Korean cinema in February 2016. It belonged to Spirits’ Homecoming, by CHO Jung-rae, a film depicting the girls taken to the battlefields as Japanese comfort women during WWII. 

 

In Korea under Japanese Occupation in 1943, Jung-min (KANG Ha-na), a 14 year old innocent girl, is forced to take the train by the Japanese soldiers who came to her home. Jung-min and other girls in the similar situation finally arrive at a comfort place for Japanese soldiers somewhere in China. They spend tragic days beyond words, where violence and rape form part of everyday life. Besides, Eun-kyung (CHOI Ri), a girl living in 1991, starts to feel Jung-min’s spirit once she got possessed. 

 

Spirits’ Homecoming is based on the survival story of comfort women, on their own testimony. This film finally made great news as the political climate changed around this sensitive issue, but not at the beginning. 

 

 

 

The beginning of the film was a mere coincidence. In 2002, director CHO Jung-rae (Duresori : The Voice of the East, 2012; WONDERS, 2015) was working at the House of Sharing which is home for the living comfort women as a volunteer for art therapy, when he saw the picture drawn by KANG Il-chul, a comfort woman survivor. The picture illustrated girls being burnt on fire in a hole in the ground, a military bus full of girls on board, and soldiers watching them. 

 

With this picture as a motif, CHO started to write a scenario truthfully reflecting the testimony of the comfort women. CHO Jeong-a, the author of Dreaming of Hwaseong, a historic musical, who is also CHO Jung-rae’s sister, joined the work, too. He wanted a story of a girl, mother and grandmother, rather than a historic drama tapping on rage and hatred. 

 

“I made this film in the hope that we may take home their devastated souls who had a tragic death in a foreign land and serve them with a warm meal. It does not simply condemn the Japanese or comfort the survivors, but I wanted it to be a genuine wish for the war free world,” confesses CHO. 

 

However, the scenario was not easy to write. It took as long as 11 years, revising after revising, because it was hard to find investment as it dealt with a sensitive issue. Finally the solution came with crowd funding. The staff asked audience for funding upon releasing teaser poster and videos in July 2013. The funding bank account opened on the official homepage and such crowd funding continued at various websites. Finally the participants reached 75,270 and the fund earned USD 1 million which was more than 50% of the entire production budget. It was an unprecedented success. 

 

Actors and film staffs also added their two cents. Without the resources to cast well known actors, the film still had great established actors including SON Sook, OH Jee-hye and JUNG In-gi, who volunteered to appear with no fee. The girls in the leads were rookie actresses selected by audition. They had such innocent faces as if they came directly from that era. For the role of Japanese soldiers, Korean immigrants in Japan volunteered, who had been deeply interested in this issue. 

 

At the shooting location, there was always the testimonial book of the comfort women. The story of 200,000 victims who never returned home, in the memory of the 238 survivors, was transferred onto the screen shot by shot. “The shooting session was often full of tears,” reveals CHO. Actors and staffs cried in one another’s arms. That is how the shooting ended in June 2015. 

 

 

 

Once complete, the film was first screened to the comfort women survivors at the House of Sharing and crowd funding participants. Screening took a tour nationwide in December 2015, and towards the end of January in the new year, screening took place for the participants in the US in cities and states like LA, Arizona, Washington D.C. and New York City. In February the film finally met the participants in Japan and was passionately received. 

 

However the commercial film market was a totally different story. The maximum number of screens that Spirits’ Homecoming found before release was only 21. However, the funding participants called the theaters and wrote to them, requesting more screens. 

 

The prospect was rather cloudy right until the release day but during the first weekend, Spirits’ Homecoming hit the number one place in the domestic box office with 805,000 admissions, a figure not easily reached even by a commercial film. On the 7th day of release, it was expanded to the maximum, to 876 screens and 3,938 screenings. In the 4 weeks since then, it stayed within the top ten box office hits and attracted 3.49 million viewers. 

 

The great performance in Korea continued abroad. Starting with release on March 11th in LA and Dallas, Spirits’ Homecoming expanded to 17 screens nationwide in the US. In April, a special screening occurred in Atlanta, where CHO Jung-rae and two survivors, LEE Ok-sun and KANG Il-chul attended. The film was released in Canada, and is scheduled for release in Australia and New Zealand as well.  

 

Online international release was also attempted. Digital screening in the US, Canada and the UK also began. M-Line Distribution, the international distributor of Spirits’ Homecoming, tried digital distribution at the same time, through KORTV run by Apple TV and Amazon TV, for the first time for a Korean film. KORTV is based on home-cinema system but the screening schedule is fixed as in the theater, and Spirits’ Homecoming met the viewers 5 times a day in metropolises like LA, Vancouver, New York, Toronto and London. 

 

Spirits’ Homecoming is to meet the world audience again at the market screening at the 69th edition of Cannes Film Festival. Once screened on May 16th at the Cannes Film Market, which is among the biggest film markets in the world, Spirits’ Homecoming is to begin another unprecedented journey, meeting new audiences and producing new miracles.