KFN Living Memories: Factory Complex
위로공단

  • Director

    Im Heung-soon

  • Genre

  • Release Date

    2014

  • Runtime

    94 mins

  • Cert

    15

  • Awards

    2015 Venice Biennale Arte | Silver Lion
    2015 Shanghai International Film Festival | Documentary Competition
    2015 Montreal World Film Festival | Documentaries of the World
    2015 DOK Leipzig | International Programme
    2016 Images Festival | Opening Night

Drawing parallels across several decades, Factory Complex engages with the struggles and suffering of women workers in various industries across Korea and beyond. Beginning with Korean textile workers in the 1960s before taking us inside the textile industry in Cambodia today, the film confronts audiences, drawing on archival footage and testimonies of those who were present in the factories at the time. It takes us through their trials both within their workspaces and outside in strike action and organisation to make change, in contrast to the current situation in Cambodia.

Following on from director Im Heung-soon’s Jeju Prayer (2012), Factory Complex continues the director’s work with memories of overlooked trauma as a way of presenting alternative narratives of the injustice done to ordinary people. Im Heung-Soon’s mastery of providing a voice to the marginalised with careful, poetic handling of the presentation of these memories is truly realised in this piece.

 

Robyn Minshall

 

The screening will be accompanied by introduction from Dr Hyunseon Lee. She is currently a Privat-dozent in Modern German Literature/Media Studies, German Department of University Siegen. She is also a Research Associate at Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, and Centre for Creative Industries, Media and Screen Studies, SOAS (School of Oriental & Asian Studies), University of London, where she has taught Korean cinema for the last 4 years.

 

Her recent research interests focus on film festivals, Korean peninsula cinema and Korean Wave, Aesthetics of Media with a focus on interculturality and intermediality, German and Comparative Literature. She has published various works on German literature, media and gender, Japanese film, martial arts film, Korean film and history, shamanism, and Korean visual culture, North Korean film and opera performance.