Abstract:

In 1980, in the South Korean town of Kwangju, soldiers fired into a crowd of demonstrators, killing hundreds. Director Jang Sun Woo powerfully personalizes this ugly chapter in South Korea's political history, creating necessary catharsis for his countrymen and at the same time composing an achingly beautiful lament for a lost child. Orphaned in the Kwangju massacre, her sanity lost in a mass grave, Jang Sun Woo's ghost of a girl wanders toward Seoul in search of a long-dead elder brother. The mad child's plight so speaks to the lumpish, unthinking laborer who has taken her in as a sexual utility that she resurrects his conscience and his humanity. The blighted innocence of this "petal" is also South Korea's, or any other nation that brutalizes its children.