Spirits' Homecoming

In 1943 Jung-min, fourteen years old, is taken from her village in Korea to a Japanese military camp in China. She is held there with other girls. The film does not make a spectacle of what they went through; it carries the weight of it through silence and through what came after. Years later one of the survivors tries to bring her friend's spirit home. Cho Jung-rae's film began from a drawing made by Kang Il-chul, one of the survivors. It took the director fourteen years to finish; the production stopped repeatedly for lack of money and was completed in the end with contributions from more than seventy-five thousand people. The system the Japanese military set up during the war is historically documented; the argument between the two countries continues to this day.