16 Aug May Story

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It is May 2008. The South Korean city of Gwangju, will commemorate the May 18th 1980 uprising in style. They will stage a grand re-enactment of the scenes of the May uprising 25 years earlier, when martial law troops killed civilians, including women and children, who were simply exercising their democratic right to assemble and protest, in the early days of the South Korean democracy. The May 1980 has ever since been a dark stain on South Korean history. For the re-enactment, two groups of Gwangju citizens will play the roles of Citizen Army on the one hand, and of the Martial-law troops on the other, and confront each other in the square in front of the provincial government’s civic center. The movie begins with stark documentary footage dealing with the actual event. Gradually, the story of Soonji and Jaegu during the re-enactment takes hold. Before long, the historic facts and fiction run against each other, as Soonji remembers her parent’s plight of earlier times. As the reenactment groups collide, so do the facts of Soonji’s life and the fiction she is now engaged in, until she can no long separate fact from fiction.