Welcome to BASE21

By Terry Park/Staff Reporter
(parkterry@hotmail.com)

Seoul, Korea -- From exotic dancers in San Francisco to Mcdonald's employees in Moscow to hospital workers in Kwangju, stories of individual and mass resistance to capitalist oppression occurs every day, in every part of the world. Equally as heroic are the filmakers, particularly the participants themselves, who uncover these subversive narratives and meld image with word to re-create fragments of the hidden world to crack the seamless, pulseless reality that is conjured by neo-liberal magic. Progressive films have the capacity to interrogate critical issues and question long-held notions, but more importantly, to inspire people to act, and to be actors (in the political sense).

The Seoul International Labor Film and Video Festival, now in its fifth year of successful existence, has recognized the revolutionary potential of visual art and politics in the pursuit of a radical transformation of the existing global order, and the need for international solidarity to have a creative, artistic component.

Despite the late fall weather and lack of publicity, this year's festival, which took place near Seoul National University Hospital in Hyewa-dong, saw its highest attendance ever--approximately 2000 to 3000 people over five days, from November 20th to the 25th. The weekend was especially busy, with many people turned away. According to Myung-Joon Kim, the head of the festival, this year's strong pool of films as well as the internet helped spread the word.

According to Kim, the audience was extremely diverse, a reflection of the diversity of topics, subjects, and locales of the films. It included students in video training programs, independent documentary workers, university students, trade union members, non-union workers, union officials, Canadian anarchists, and Korean-American activists.

The festival again was hosted by Labor News Production (LNP), a leader in labor media production and education in Korea. It was also sponsored by the Korean Film Commission (KOFIC) and the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU).

According to Kim, "The concept hasn't changed much. We're always covering various labor issues in Korea and in the international arena, providing space to workers to screen their videos, and having discussions on challenges to video activism."

A total of twenty-five pieces were accepted for multiple screenings--thirteen from Korea and twelve from other countries. Most of the international entries came from the United States and Europe, but there were also films from Argentina and Brazil.

Though this may point towards a bias towards the West, it can also be explained by the fact that capitalism, and therefore local challenges to capitalism, has penetrated more deeply in industrialized countries moreso than the Third World. However, the themes of globalization, worker exploitation, and everyday forms of resistance are global in nature. In addition, the issues and people treated in the films were not necessarily specific to the country in which the film originated.

According to Kim, this year's festival highlighted the issue of immigrant workers. "Bread and Roses," arguably the most popular and well-known film of the festival, was directed by British Ken Loach, took place in Los Angeles, and tells the story of illegal Mexican female immigrants. Several audience members, however, expressed disappointment in the colonial overtones of the portrayal of an interracial romance between a white male activist and a Mexican labor organizer. "The Other Border," a documentary from Spain, focuses on migrant laborers from Pakistan, Morocco, Ecuador, and other countries on a hunger strike to demand official recognition and support from the Spanish government.

There were also strong entries focusing on women workers, including "Live Nude Girls Unite!", a well-made American documentary on the struggles of the first union for exotic dancers. This was arguably the second-most popular film, next to "Bread and Roses."

Of course, most of the entries were made by Koreans on labor struggles in Korea. Many of the directors came from LNP's weekly training program on video making. Four videos were made by trainees. Other directors came from LNP itself and from the Daewoo worker's video collective, which receives support from LNP. In all, audience members were witness to a wide array of labor issues, but perhaps more importantly, were confronted with pieces such as "Live Nude Girls Unite!" which challenged conventional notions of who is a "worker" and what constitutes a site of struggle.

In other words, the lives as well as the movements were presented in their sobering and rich complexity. As one audience member commented on the film festival's online bulletin board, "[The film festival] was great. [The films] was not too hard to understand nor were they too serious. I received a variety of perspectives from all over the world, which inspired me to take action."

As for the future of the festival, Kim commented, "We have to be more organized. We have to organize more people to prepare the festival, especially in translation and promotion of the festival. Also, this year we started a new section, a "retrospective" section of labor films made in the early 20th century. We had one German film made in 1930s and one Japanese film from the 1980s. Next year we plan to have a retro section once more. By doing this, we hope to include recent issues and old issues which must be evaluated again."

On that note, Kim continued, "Next year, we want to have a section on the Spanish War. This year we had a lot of entries from Spain, and the Spanish War was important in terms of revolutionary ideology. This is not well-known in Korea. We may also have a piece on the Paris Commune."

On other labor media-related projects, Kim said, "We hope to start a web-based project to disseminate and collect information on new and old labor films from around the world, and we need help from as many activists as possible. It would be important to have a video archive for the purposes of international solidarity in this age of globalization. Then we can be more organized, and exchange information more efficiently, which would help prepare for international gatherings such as the labor media conference."