[Welcome to Dongmakgol]

The film Welcome To Dongmakgol (2005) directed by Park Kwang Hyun, tells a story about soldiers from both the South and North who enter a village in a mountainous district where people are unaware of the nation’s division and the war.

           What grabbed my attention was the setting that the movie took place at - Dongmakgol. First of all, the village is situated in a very remote area (in Kangwondo Province) that the villagers are not even aware that the Korean War broke out. The population of the village is fixed – so the inhabitants all know each other, and there are rarely any newcomers. However, three random groups of people visit Dongmakgol at the same time – the American soldier (Smith), the South Korean soldiers (Pyo Hyun-Chul, Moon Sang-sang), and the North Korean soldiers (Lee Soo-hwa, Jang Young-hee, Taek-gi). The people who were fighting against each other suddenly become incorporated to the villagers as if the war never broke out (they adjust to the village). Being a communist or not did not matter to the people (ideology was not worth killing one another; people were not influenced by ideology).

Furthermore, why the isolated village? It is mentioned in Shin’s reading that “Korean agrarianists took a strong anticapitalist, antiurban, and by extension, antimodern stance in reconstructing rural society as a step toward building a new Korea (Shin, 142)”. Anticapitalism and self-sufficiency (Juche) are two significant ideologies for the North… Could the director be implying nostalgia towards the old days when life was not “too capitalistic”? (Bevan also mentions “the village of Dongmakgol nostalgically evokes a past before Korea’s involvement upon the world stage, before occupation, division and war (Bevan, 53)”)

           In addition, the characters build a family-like relationship between each other. For instance, Dong-gu’s mother tells the South Korean and the American Allies that Lee Soo-hwa is her husband, and Jang Young-hee is also introduced as being the husband of another woman from the village. This reminds the viewers that Korea is based on one ethnicity, that they are all related by “one blood”; introducing each other as a family is not a foreign concept. Moreover, after the soldiers from the North and South decide to get along, Moon Sang-sang asks Jang Young-hee if he could call Jang hyung (elder brother) – the family-like connection is once again presented. (As I wrote in my previous blogs, the elder brother is always presented as from coming from the North – is there a specific reason why?)

           When this film was released in Korea, it also was a hit; I believe that depicting soldiers from North and South as being able to get along with each other touched the audience of today’s generation. I also think that the Sunshine Policy of that period would have influenced people’s perception on reunification as well. As Kiyoung wrote in her blog, it might not have touched the audience as much as it did if the film were released more recently (from my point of view, with constant provocation of the North, not many South Koreans feel sympathetic to North).