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.
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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