New York Asian Film Festival (Fri, Jul 11, 2025 – Sun, Jul 27, 2025)


KIM MIN-CHAE, KIM HYANG-GI IN HALLAN

MYONG-MI HA: HALLAN (2025 NEW YORK ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL 2026

Jeju 4·3 - heroic survival of a brutal slice of local Korean history

The Jeju uprising (in South Korea, The Jeju 4·3 Incident, Korean: 제주 4·3 사건) was an uprising on Jeju Island, South Korea, from April 1948 to May 1949. 30,000 islanders wound up dead, a horror that for years was not spoken of. 30,000 is a lot of people: how many details are known? The pretext of violence apparently was protest against the general election scheduled in the United States-occupied half of the peninsula; or the festival blurb says soldiers are "ruthlessly crushing opposition to the country’s partition." An article by Moon Ki-hoon in the [url="https://www.koreaherald.com/article/10615473"]Korea Herald [/url] explains some things this film does not. It takes up things in medias res. Its focus is on a six-year-old girl Kang Hae-saeng (Kim Min-chae, who was four!) who survives killings but loses the power of speech; she is the daughter of a tough woman diver, Go Ah-jin (Kim Hyang-gi). Her gentle bespectacled father is murdered in front of her. We see that here: what seem to us to be innocent people keep being senselessly killed by right wing soldiers because they are rebels, or they think they are. This is a difficult, nerve-wracking watch that partially opens a moment in history to anyone who sees it.

The title is the Korean name for a rare orchid native to Jeju Island (한란) - symbolic of the females' survival chosen by the woman director of the film.

Korean viewers explain that the film is in the island Jeju dialect, even nailing local variations across the island, and requires Korean subs for them to understand. Kim Hyang-gi spent months preparing and mastering the dialect. Other efforts beside the dialect make the film authentic, notably the clothing worn by the woman and the girl. Though a lot of this isn't obvious to non-Koreans, the sense that Jeju island is a special place that has been turned into a horrible killing field is clear. There is one soldier with a small crew wandering randomly executing innocents as being "rioters" or "commies." I imagined Lt. Calley with free range over an attractive island full of greenery for an extended time.

Six-year-old Go Ah-jin is exceptionally wily and tough; early on she has to survive when her mother sends her out on her own, an excessive challenge which she nonetheless survives. At one telling point a man is pointing a rifle at her (now back with her mother) and she reaches out and pulls the end of it down. He's a young soldier, probably about 18. But her resistance spirit takes a toll on her.

The Korea Herald article explains that "under the country's military dictatorships through the 1960s and 80s," locals could land in prison "for even mentioning what happened"; it was only in the post-1980's democratization that it started to be openly spoken of. O Muel's 2012 film Jiseul, the article says, won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, and Zainichi (ethnic Korean permanent resident of Japan) Yang Yonghi's 2022 documentary relates her mother's escape from Jeju during the incident time. A 2021 novel by Nobel Prize-winner Han Kang has brought the time and place to a global audience.

As Moon Ki-hoon points out, this film winds up being "a long, plodding journey" for the girl and her mother, with no attention to the larger picture, which has its plusses and minuses as an approach. There's a "primal grandeur" to the lone survival battle. I won't forget that soldier randomly executing people on the road. It's intense.

Hallan 한란, 119 mins., released in Korea Nov. 26, 2025, the film has been shown at a number of festivals including Aichi, Helsinki and Florence. Screened for this review as part of the 2026 NYAFF. Showtime:
Sunday, July 12
6:30 PM
Q&Awith Ha Myung-mi, Kim Hyang-gi, and Yang Young-hee (producer)

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.