PEOPLE ARE THE SKY | By Dai Sil Kim-Gibson | Pacific Affairs
FILM REVIEWS
VOLUME 91 – NO. 1
PEOPLE ARE THE SKY | By Dai Sil Kim-Gibson
New York: Women Make Movies, 2015. 1 DVD (94 min). US$395.00, universities, colleges, and institutions; US$89.00, K-12, public libraries, and select groups. In Korean and English, with English subtitles.
URL http://www.wmm.com/filmcatalog/pages/c935.shtml.
People Are the Sky is a very personal film, and is better for it. Filmmaker Dai Sil Kim-Gibson was born in Sinch’ŏn, in present-day North Korea, during the colonial era. With her family, she came south to Seoul in 1945. After first leaving Korea for her doctoral studies in 1962, she decided after a brief experience of the repression of the Park Chung Hee government in 1970 to settle permanently in the United States. There she met and married her husband Don Gibson, with whom she eventually lived in his natal Iowa until his death in 2009. Kim-Gibson’s sorrow and her love for Don frame and suffuse the film. The title is something of a mobile metaphor throughout, but its first referent is the love Don had for the open Iowa sky and the open love he had for people, and the love for others that Kim-Gibson herself experienced with and through him.
In 2013, Kim-Gibson made a journey first to Seoul and then onwards to P’yŏngyang and finally to her hometown of Sinch’ŏn. People Are the Sky intersperses a chronicle of this trip with archival footage, over which Kim-Gibson narrates her own memories of important moments in modern Korean history, as well as interviews with scholars and activists in the United States, South Korea, and, eventually, North Korea. Many of these figures are quite well-known authors in the field: Charles Armstrong, Bruce Cumings, Suk-Young Kim, Kim Dong-choon, and Hwang Sok-yong, for instance, all make significant appearances. As a result, the film offers both a personal and a critical-scholarly review of important turning points in modern Korean history, from colonialism and its end to the US-Soviet occupation, division, the Korean War, postwar development, and political shifts in both South and North. One could do much worse than to show this film in a classroom or public education setting as an introduction to how the Koreas became divided and why they have stayed that way, along with connected issues such as the ongoing US military presence in the South, human rights, and the North Korean famine of the 1990s.
Yet to watch People Are the Sky only as a critical documentary would be to miss much of what is moving and important about it. At one point, Kim-Gibson makes a short narrative detour to discuss the nineteenth-century Korean indigenous new religion of Tonghak. At first, this struck me as an odd tangent in a film otherwise concerned with the present and more recent past—and in truth, the significance of the moment may be lost on many audiences. But as she goes on with her explanation, it becomes clear that through her journey and through the film itself she seeks to embody the Tonghak belief in innaech’ŏn, the immanence of heaven in humanity. People, once again, are the sky. Kim-Gibson brings this deep humanism to her encounters in both South and North Korea. She is at once a forward, vivacious, and sympathetic interviewer of ordinary people. For example, while her scholar and activist interlocutors present a critical evaluation of US aims in South Korea since 1945, when she interviews ordinary people she allows the diversity and ambivalence of South Korean opinion on the ongoing US military presence to come forth. She seeks out children in public places when she has the chance, making older ones practice their English, addressing younger ones with the sort of patter familiar from many a Korean grandmother (“What’s your name?” “How pretty!”).
Indeed, who Kim-Gibson is both socially and personally and thus the character of her rapport matters a great deal to the high quality of People Are the Sky, and makes it stand out from other films that promise—the trope itself is tired—a glimpse into North Korea. She possesses a common historical experience and social intimacy with many of the people she interviews, and at moments takes advantage of the sort of social license accorded older women in Korea. When she asks older people about their lives during the war, they open up to her as someone who shared the same tragedy. When she goes to a North Korean veterans’ event and talks with one old soldier, it is the mutual emotional catharsis of liberation in 1945 that comes through over and above his glorification of the role of Kim Il Sung. And when, in a P’yŏngyang park, her minder curtails her attempts to ask questions of schoolchildren (the mediation of her trip by guides and minders is addressed quite directly), Kim-Gibson is annoyed but also has a laugh with him in a way that releases the ideological tension of the moment by asking one final inappropriate question to someone she recognizes as doing his job. May I talk to those trees over there, and are there questions I should not ask? Notwithstanding the painful history the film explores, Kim-Gibson’s warm humour is prominent. She makes self-deprecating jokes about her wild hair, and invites others to join in. “Fashionable,” one old North Korean woman finally says, and everyone laughs; Kim-Gibson crows in triumph to her guide.
When she finally gets to Sinch’ŏn, she recognizes little from her youth. She is taken to another North Korean memorial to another act of American malfeasance, the Sinch’ŏn Massacre of 1950, and joins a site interpreter, whose family was killed there, in a wider sorrow for the human losses of the period. But then she goes to another park and meets more children there, on a school trip from across the country, and has with them the easy dialogue she was unable to have in P’yŏngyang. Shortly after, she goes to Kŭmgang Mountain, and is surprised by how hard the climb is, but is patiently assisted by her uncomplaining guide for the hours up and down. From these last incidents Kim-Gibson arrives at a heartfelt, if not unexpected, conclusion: her home place may be gone, but she shares the sky with North Korea’s people. As a historical film, People Are the Sky is excellent; as a work of art, it is beautiful.
Robert Oppenheim
The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, USA
pp. 219-221
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People are the Sky (2014)
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8/10
People are the Sky, by Korea-born American filmmaker Da- Sil Kim-Gibson, is a film about her journey back to her childhood hometown in North Korea. Goes into the history of North and South Korea, the Korean War, and the devastation of North Korea by the US-led military in 1950s. Of course the filming in North Korea was highly restricted and she was chaperoned wherever she went, so but still she manages to capture the humanity of North Korean people and the connections she made with them during her journey. Great interviews with Korea experts, including Columbia Professor Charles Armstrong, and Chicago U Prof Bruce Cumings. After the film screening, we had a Skype interview with the filmmaker (she is based in NYC) and she told us that she sold a property she and her husband owned to make this film. She is now 75 years old. Talk about dedication!
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5/10
Apologia for North Korean regime, acceptance of Potemkin Village mars this uneven documentary
frimp1317 April 2016
frimp1317 April 2016
At its best, People Are The Sky is a touching personal story about the director's experience fleeing North Korea as a child during the Korean war and returning many years later to find a very different place, plus a revisionist history of how U.S. military & political actions created two Koreas, one of which hates the U.S. to this day, at least part due to bombings of civilians during the Korean War.
Unfortunately, only half the film is spent on those subjects. The other half, unfortunately is mired with an unfortunate & deeply misguided apologia of the North Korean regime, including a naive acceptance of the Potemkin Village production that North Korean officials put on for the director's benefit and the attempted pitch of a (false) moral equivalence between the totalitarian dictatorship of North Korea that controls every aspect of people's lives and the various faults of the US criminal justice system.
The film starts a bit slow, going over both the director's personal history and the modern history of North & South Korea. It takes quite a while for the director to even get to North Korea, which is the main selling point of this film. Once the director enters North Korea, it seems as though she is not going to take things lying down from the North Korean guides, sparring with them rather feistily, and being repeatedly instructed to stop asking certain questions.
But after awhile, the director seems to relent to the demands of the guides and the remainder of the film becomes what the North Korean regime wants you to see, featuring interview after interview with people conspicuously wearing pins with pictures of the Great Leader or the North Korean flag. She visits a Potemkin (and gov't run) Christian church in Pyongyang, interviews a gov't bureaucrat who denies that anything is amiss and talks about how the People's palace is built above the government buildings in Pyongyang because the government must look up to the people, tours the locations of several alleged "massacres" of North Koreans committed by Americans (and uncritically quotes the regime tour guides at each location without providing any context or rebuttal), meets the widow of a party politico who has fond memories of how they met, and visits a happy upper middle class couple who chat happily about having 24-hour free day care, and how the wife works a job and the husband sometimes cooks dinner. "Equality!" beams the director, ignoring the horrors visited upon so many other couples by the regime.
There is even a short section of direct apologia for North Korean human rights abuses where the director concludes that racial justice issues in America really make North Korea no worse than the US.
After the screening of the film, the director was asked about why she didn't show more of the negative parts of North Korea. She explained that the gov't-supplied "guides" (in reality, censor-chaperone regime information officers) controlled where she could go. But then, rather than talking about how this was a problem, she said she didn't understand why so many people thought it was such a problem to have a guide help show you around an unfamiliar country. That pretty much says all that needs to be said about the credulity with which she approached this project.
Last Revised: June 25, 2018
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