[Daviscenter-list] Korea Institute Film Screening, April 11

Friday, April 11 - Film Screening - Co-sponsored by the Korea Institute and the Davis Center for Russian & Eurasian Studies "Koryo Saram" Co-directed by Y. David Chung and Matt Dibble Y. David Chung, Film Co-director, in person Tsai Auditorium, CGIS South Building, 1730 Cambridge St., 6:30pm, Free and open to the public For more information on "Koryo Saram" please go to: http://koryosaram.net/ /Film synopsis:/ In 1937, Stalin began a campaign of massive ethnic cleansing and forcibly deported everyone of Korean origin living in the coastal provinces of the Far East Russia near the border of North Korea to the unsettled steppe country of Central Asia 3700 miles away. This story of 180,000 Koreans who became political pawns during the Great Terror is the central focus of this film. With political scientist and executive producer Meredith Jung-En Woo and cameraman and co-director Matt Dibble, Chung traveled to film the survivors of the deportation and their descendants who still live in Kazakhstan today. Koryo Saram (the Soviet Korean phrase for Korean person) tells the harrowing saga of survival in the open steppe country and the sweep of Soviet history through the eyes of these deported Koreans, who were designated by Stalin as an "unreliable people" and enemies of the state. Through recently uncovered archival footage and new interviews, the film follows the deportees' history of integrating into the Soviet system while working under punishing conditions in Kazakhstan, a country which became a concentration camp of exiled people from throughout the Soviet Union. Today, in the context of Kazakhstan's recent emergence as a rapidly modernizing, independent state, the story of the Kazakhstani-Koreans situated within this ethnically diverse country has resonance with the experience of many Americans and how they have assimilated to form new cultures in our world of increasingly displaced people. -- ---------------------------------------------- Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies Harvard University 1730 Cambridge Street, 3rd Floor, Suite 301 Cambridge, MA 02138 Phone: 617.495.4037 Fax: 617.495.8319 http://www.daviscenter.fas.harvard.edu