Thursday, January 24, 2008
5:00 AM
Lorch Hall, Askwith Auditorium, 611 Tappan Street
A Petal (Jang Sun-woo, 1996, 96 min.)
In May 1980, Korean soldiers turned their guns on protesters in the city of Gwangju, killing and injuring hundreds, in what has become known as the Gwangju Massacre, one of the most traumatic events in modern Korean history. Jang Sun-woo’s A Petal is an anguished, allegorical treatment of the incident, told from the point of view of a young girl who is driven mad after witnessing her mother’s death in the massacre. As she wanders through the post-Gwangju landscape, encountering cruelty and mistreatment, she becomes, in this hallucinatory, almost surreal film, a metaphor for Korean society at the time.
