Representation of Diasporic Memories and Possibilities for Post–Cold War History: On the Documentaries of Soyoung

Abstract

This article analyzes the documentary film Goodbye My Love, North Korea: Red Youth (2017) directed by Soyoung Kim. By representing the lives of North Korean students who defected to the Soviet Union in the late 1950s, the film evokes a forgotten North Korean diaspora, whose memories were suppressed in the national history of the two Koreas during the Cold War. Reflections on the theme of “situated identities” in the modern life frequented with migration and immigration are persistent in the works of Kim, from Koryu: Southern Women (2000) to the recent Exile Trilogy. Kim’s quest expands to her interests in the Others who remain alien in their own homes and the alienated from the national history. In “Goryeo Arirang”(2016) and “Goodbye My Love, NK,” Kim approaches the entities of the diaspora through the means of cultural actions of the diaspora, by finding songs, literature, and films of ethnic Koreans in the former Soviet Union and inserting and positioning them into documentaries. However, in the latter film, the sentiment of nationalism is more prevalent, in the fraternal solidarity of the former North Korean male artists and the process of the ethnic Korean community in Central Asia in creating their work in the Korean language. As a result, the film has an inherent risk of turning into a criticism of the North Korean regime—all so familiar in South Korea—and into a history of ordeal of a nation. As a critical input, I attempt to use the concepts of “diaspora space” and “homing desire” by Avtar Brah to read into the post–Cold War changes in the positionality of diasporic subjects hidden in the film.