by ANDREW SALMON
Reality of demilitarized zone is little known but new film’s unlikely portrayal strikes a chord on the bitterly divided peninsula
SEOUL – Kim Tae-geun walked into the cinema this weekend expecting comedy. He left deeply moved.
“The movie theater was full of young boys and girls laughing a lot,” said the South Korean special forces veteran. “They were silent and some of them were crying at the end of the movie.”
The film he watched, “6/45” is currently topping South Korean box offices. It features a lightweight plot: A winning lottery ticket – number 6/45 – drifts across the Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ, where it is retrieved by North Korean soldiers who learn that it is the winner. Naturally, South Korean troops hatch a plot to get it back.
But though the film begins with laughs, by the time the end credits roll, the bitter reality of unbridgeable national division stirs different emotions.
“It was so touching,” Kim, who asked that his real name not be used in this article, said of the audience. “And it was touching for me, too.”
For Kim – today a successful entrepreneur who runs several companies in downtown Seoul – the film’s portrayals are personal. Scenes in the film when troops from both sides meet in the high-tension no man’s land resurrected Kim’s memories of encountering North Koreans during midnight ambush duty inside the DMZ.
The experiences of Kim and other former soldiers who spoke to Asia Times make clear that the commonly held images of the DMZ differ from reality. More broadly, the national division that the zone so starkly represents is rarely far from the news.
Currently, South Korean-US military drills are underway while fears of another North Korean nuclear test hang heavy over the divided peninsula. Meanwhile, the impermeability of the DMZ means that a solution to South Korea’s demographic crisis, highlighted by recently published data, remains far out of reach.
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