A new Korean film is shedding light on one of South Korea's most tragic yet largely forgotten historical events. "Hallan," directed by Ha Myung-mi and starring Kim Hyang-gi, tells the story of a mother and daughter's desperate fight for survival during the Jeju 4.3 Incident, a massacre that claimed over 30,000 lives between 1947 and 1954. The film opens in theaters on November 26.
Jeju Island, now famous for its cherry blossoms, volcanic beaches, and luxury honeymoon resorts, attracts millions of tourists annually. However, most visitors remain unaware that the island's soil contains the remains of roughly 10 percent of its population from that era. The Jeju 4.3 Incident began as an uprising against plans to hold separate elections in US-occupied South Korea, with many fearing these elections would permanently divide the Korean Peninsula.
When protesters took up arms, the government's response was brutally violent. Government forces, supported by right-wing paramilitary troops, swept through villages, burning homes and executing anyone suspected of having leftist sympathies. Under South Korea's military dictatorships that lasted through the 1960s and 1980s, even mentioning these events could result in imprisonment for locals.
Artistic exploration of this massacre only became possible after South Korea's democratization in the late 1980s. Recent decades have seen a gradual emergence of works revisiting these events, including O Muel's 2012 film "Jiseul," which was shot in black-and-white with local non-professional actors and won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. Zainichi filmmaker Yang Yonghi's 2022 documentary "Soup and Ideology" traced her mother's escape from Jeju during the incident, connecting family trauma to the broader story of Japan's Korean diaspora.
Han Kang's 2021 novel "We Do Not Part" also explored this history through a meditation on inherited grief, following a woman's journey through snow-covered Jeju. After Han won the Nobel Prize in Literature last year, this once-suppressed narrative found a global audience, bringing international attention to these events.
Director Ha Myung-mi explained her connection to the subject at Wednesday's press conference at CGV Yongsan in Seoul. Having lived on Jeju Island for 13 years, she attends the April 3 memorial every year, but felt that simply showing up to grieve wasn't enough. "I wanted to understand the people who went through this, to really know them," she said. "That felt like the only honest way to share in their pain."
The film centers on Ah-jin, played by Kim Hyang-gi, a young mother married to a schoolteacher who has joined the guerrillas hiding in the mountains. When government troops descend on her coastal village, she flees to a cave with other townspeople, leaving behind her young daughter Hae-saeng, played by Kim Min-chae, and her mother-in-law. While soldiers shoot down anyone who stays, Hae-saeng somehow manages to escape, and mother and daughter reunite for a desperate scramble across mountains and ocean, trying to outlast the troops hunting them.
The film's title refers to an orchid that blooms on Hallasan mountain even in winter, symbolizing a stubborn flower that refuses to die in the cold. This metaphor reflects the persistence and resilience of the characters facing impossible odds during this dark period of Korean history.
"Hallan" takes a deliberately intimate approach to this historical tragedy. After establishing political context through opening title cards, the film focuses on the mother-daughter pair's solitary ordeal. The violence is seen almost entirely through their eyes, with little attention paid to larger battles or the politics driving them. The constant threat closes in from all sides, and even the leftist insurgents aren't spared criticism, with the film suggesting they were complicit in the island's spiral of violence.
This approach pulls the work away from historical documentation, whether by design or due to the constraints of a modest independent film budget. By sidestepping ideology and focusing on maternal instinct, the film at times risks turning a historically specific atrocity into a more generic disaster story. However, there's also power in this retreat to the intimate, with the film's most memorable moments coming when it simply watches Ah-jin and Hae-saeng navigate the wilderness with raw determination.
Director Ha shoots the island's natural beauty with a painterly eye, framing her characters against vast stretches of wilderness. These compositions carry an elemental force that gives the mother and daughter's struggle a kind of primal grandeur, highlighting their will to survive against Jeju's scenic but dangerous landscape.
One of the film's most distinctive features is its commitment to linguistic authenticity. Nearly every line of dialogue is delivered in Jeju dialect, which is thick and archaic enough to require Korean subtitles even for Korean audiences. Director Ha worked with five dialect coaches to perfect even the slightest regional variations. "Each part of the island speaks differently," she explained. "We matched actors with coaches from their characters' home villages."
Kim Hyang-gi, who broke through as a child actor and has since appeared in hits like "Along with the Gods" and "Hansan," spent months preparing for her role. "Mastering the dialect was everything," she said. "We did one-on-one coaching in Seoul, then scouted locations so I could walk through the actual terrain. Filming on Jeju helped with the immersion. The environment does half the work for you."
The actress admitted she knew little about the massacre before taking on the project. "A lot of people don't," she said. "It's been hard to talk about this history. I learned most of it while we were making the film." She mentioned visiting dark tour sites around Jeju, places where the massacres occurred, saying that walking through those locations helped her understand what they were trying to show.
Four-year-old Kim Min-chae stole the show at the press conference, stepping up to the microphone when asked if she had anything to say. "Thanks for coming to see 'Hallan,'" she said in Jeju dialect, then switched to standard Korean. "Please write good things about it and help spread the word."
"Hallan" premiered at the Aichi International Women's Film Festival in September before screening for Jeju locals last month. Director Ha had initially worried the film might be too rooted in Korean history to connect with international audiences, but that wasn't the case. "People connected it to their own histories," she said. "They'd ask about the March First Movement against Japanese rule, then talk about traumas in their own countries. One person said the film made them want to learn more about what happened on Jeju – that it gave them a way in. Their reaction meant so much to us."
