Nothing can be smoother than reconstructing the memory of the Jeju April 3rd Incident. Unlike many other Democratization Movements in Korea, such as the May 18th Democratization Movement in 1980 Gwangju, the Jeju April 3rd Incident has not encountered much allegation of fabricated history from the political power or has not evoked public dispute. I believe there are basically two assumptions behind this appreciation of the Jeju Uprising: first, victims and perpetrators are obvious, and second, this incident is too isolated from the mainland people of South Korea. However, no incident can be categorized as black and white, and if it receives zero contention from South Korean society, I believe the effort to recognize this movement would be nullified since it means no interest in whatever is being said about the Jeju incident. The film director Ha Myung-mi attempts to achieve the double mission of increasing the sense of reality of the Jeju Uprising through the screen with a balanced view of complex historical events.

Hallan follows the story of Ajin and her daughter Haeseng on 1948 Jeju Island. The film starts with the scene of Ajin and village people heading to the mountain area. Ajin leaves Haeseng and her mother-in-law, believing that the military squad would not harm the elderly and children. However, it turns out that with an indirect approval from the U.S. officer in charge, the Korean army perpetrates a massacre of innocent civilians. After witnessing the death of her grandmother and neighbors, Haeseng goes up the mountain and suffers from aphasia due to this traumatic experience, while Ajin comes down to find her daughter, worried about her safety. Ajin meets three members of the mountain resistance and discovers that they were responsible for her husband’s death. Ajin’s husband had gone down to search for his family, and the resistance killed him for fear that he would expose their presence. Ajin fortunately reunites with her daughter, and they escape into the cave. Knowing that the cave is connected to the other side of Jeju Island, they finally reach the seashore, only to be caught by the police and categorized as rioters.

The film attempts to depict that the characters and groups are not monolithic. The mountain guerrilla unit is one example. While it is all too simple to say that the army and perpetrators killed innocent people, such violence also occurs among refugees and resistance groups. On the other hand, Private Moon is conscious of killing the innocent people. In the end, Moon cannot bear what he and his unit have done and kills everyone, including himself.

Historically, the groups of military forces and the mountain guerrillas of Jeju were complex entities. The socialists played a leading role among the uprising groups, and often this fact disrupted the lives of Jeju people. The North Korean government honored the first leader of the movement, Kim Dal-sam, in the year just after April 3rd. The second leader, Lee Deok-gu, who took over from Kim, was also a socialist and eventually escalated the violent situation in Jeju, which presumably serves as the background for Hallan and led to more innocent casualties. From the government side, the Northwest Youth Association, a group of Northwest Korean émigrés who fled to South Korea after being persecuted in the North for their identities as landowners, Christians, or anti-communists, was reorganized in the South as a group of far-right gangsters and actively participated in the massacre. Private Moon’s prayer as a Christian in the film seems to reflect this background, and their cruelty was directed not only at Jeju people but also at the right-wing individuals who disagreed with them, a sign that the act of killing mattered more than one’s place on the political spectrum. During this period of purge and violence, Jeju people swept up in the fighting, together with innocent civilians like Ajin and Haeseng, became victims of the era.

While we can understand the madness of ideology in this context, the film is too didactic in repeating “for a better world” from every character. In the film, every group of people says they hope for a better world for their descendants, or they are working to build a better Korea. The director probably wants to leave it open, since she does not show the exact ending of Ajin and Haeseng. Unfortunately, the director Ha constructs multi-dimensional situations at the expense of making flat characters. It is obvious that those characters lack distinctiveness, and from here the narrative itself becomes simple. When Ha constructs the memory of the tragedy, the repeatedly said phrase makes the movie more like a story of fabrication, even though the narrative is actually largely based on the oral history collection.

In addition, it would be better if the mise-en-scène emphasized Jeju’s beauty, as this would enhance the irony of the incident through its aesthetic depiction. The place of Jeju Island has a unique position in that it has different weather compared to the Korean Peninsula, and focusing on this particular geographical backdrop may help the audience understand why they had to go deep inside the mountain rather than simply leaving it as a background. Of course, such an approach carries the danger of romanticizing nature rather than focusing on the historical narrative, but I find myself wishing that Jeju’s unique natural environment had been used to visually amplify the tragedy.

At the 25th New York Asian Film Festival, the small exhibition on the Jeju April 3rd Incident was installed at Film at Lincoln Center with the help of the Jeju 4·3 Peace Foundation. It is meaningful to introduce Hallan and My Name, which deal with the Jeju Incident in film curation, and to provide historical background on how it was represented in literature and films, and on how scholars and activists have worked to record the reality. Hallan can serve as a starting point rather than a final account, a way into the fuller range of agents behind this incident. Yang Yong-hi, the producer of Hallan and director of the documentary Soup and Ideology, offers one such example, in which her own work turns to the memory of Zainichi who returned to their hometown of Jeju from Japan after liberation, only to unintentionally return to Japan. Hallan is one telling among many; its worth lies less in how it resolves the Jeju Incident than in the room it makes for the tellings that stand alongside it.