In their book Movie Minorities: Transnational Rights Advocacy and South Korean Cinema, Hye Seung Chung and David Scott Diffrient define the “rights-advocacy cinema” genre “as a category of cultural production whose affective sway in provoking tears, raising awareness, and altering the mindsets of demographically and geographically dispersed moviegoers (at home and abroad) is what matters most, the very thing that might actually yield consequential social changes” (5). Pinpointing the 1998 presidential inauguration of Kim Dae Jung (and the subsequent formation of the National Human Rights Commission of Korea) as a pivotal juncture that brought about a new age in cinematic advocacy, the authors investigate a wide array of Korean contemporary films (post-2000) in order to contemplate its growing role in transnational activist social movements. Distinguishing itself from other works that have mostly dealt with the sociocultural influence of noncommercial films, Movie Minorities casts a wider net when delineating the parameters of rights-advocacy cinema, linking “different modes of production and meaning-making under common themes and identities, including: gender and sexuality, disability rights, prisoner rights, migrant workers’ rights, and animal rights” (23). Ultimately, Chung and Diffrient see cinema as a “body genre” that can forge an empathetic relationship with the mainstream audience through the invocation of “political affect.” This capacity to interact the “social” and the “somatic” is where the authors locate cinema’s advocatory function and transnational impact: “mobilized in the hope of inspiring a change in the mind-set of the spectator and prompting action,” the advocacy film is positioned as a galvanizing vehicle to (re)evaluate and oftentimes subvert the stagnant metaphysical discourse surrounding the global advocacy of human rights (37).In addition to the introduction that summarizes the authors’ main arguments, the book is divided into six parts, with two chapters each. Part 1, titled “Institutional Foundations and Formal Structures,” begins by tracing the political, social, and cultural changes in South Korea that transformed right-advocacy cinema from “a unifying master narrative” focused on democracy and labor to a “set of disparate minoritarian stories of disenfranchised groups” (23). The second chapter moves on to investigate If You Were Me (2003), an omnibus film joining multiple episodes by six disparate directors. Referring to its stylistic and narrative spaces between episodes as “wounding,” the authors argue that the omnibus film is “the most ‘trans’” of all cinematic forms, “collapsing transmedial, translinguistic, transgeneric, translocal, and transnational modes in the space of a single feature” (55). By highlighting the audience’s need to bridge the stylistic, narrative, and episodic gaps inherent to the omnibus format, the authors emphasize the importance of spectatorial participation. What the authors seem to be doing here is a kind of bridge-building of their own in terms of the structuring of their book: readers are tactfully eased into the textual analysis through an arguably more accessible (“watered down,” as the authors call it) film that focuses primarily on a “general emphasis on antidiscrimination” rather than on the juridical frameworks of human rights (60). In addition to their rich discussion of history, society, and even political economy, the authors are especially thorough and layered in their consideration of the regional particularities of language and overall discourse surrounding human rights and cinema. Here, for example, as they do many times throughout the book, the authors include essential discussions regarding the specific Korean meanings and sentiments behind key phrases or concepts, such as “discrimination” (ch’abyŏl; chapter 2), “cure” (chi’yu; chapter 6), and “scenery” (p’unggyŏng; chapter 9), that add an extra dimension of analysis to the meaning-making process.Part 2, “Movie Minors and Minor Cinemas,” joins a discussion on school violence and bullying in chapter 3 with an interrogation of the director Leesong Hee-il (Isong Hŭiil) in chapter 4. Contextualizing the bullying film genre within social and institutional failures, chapter 3 highlights two films, Bleak Night and Night Flight, that transcend the victim-versus-perpetuator dynamic and problematize the trope of underage villainy prevalent in teen dramas. In chapter 4, taking cue from Leesong’s own writings on “minority cinema,” the authors use Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “minor literature” to define the director-cum–LGBTQ activist’s “unique brand of minoritarian cinema” as one that deterritorializes, rather than merely constitute itself against, the major or dominant mainstream cinema (91). While Leesong’s films have appeared in other scholarship, the authors’ reading of No Regret as a “minor” text that “double-queers”—simultaneously disrupting mainstream heteronormativity and dominant genre conventions—adds a new dimension to the discussion of minoritarian cinema and its liminal possibilities. Chapter 4’s insightful discussion of Leesong’s films sets the tone for the book as a whole in many ways. By juxtaposing film theory and analysis with legislative history, politics, societal circumstance, and even ethical investigation, the authors continuously encourage their readers to consider the real-world participatory element within rights-advocacy film.Part 3, “Disability Rights in Mainstream and Minoritarian Filmmaking,” deals with the advocacy for disability rights, one chapter investigating mainstream portrayals and the other focusing on documentaries. Of all the two-chapter sections in the book, part 3 is especially nuanced in its pairing, not only because of the joined subject matter but also because of its distinctive selection of films that successfully articulate the authors’ call to define the parameters of advocacy film through theme or impact, rather than mode of production, distribution, or exhibition. Chapter 5 problematizes three mainstream films’ (Always, Blind, and Silenced) “infantilization of the disabled” while also pointing out their advocatory effect. Referring to the film Silenced in particular, Chung and Diffrient condemn the film’s sidelining of the “doubly marginalized” children for the sake of the valorization of two able-bodied adults, but also highlight its impact in provoking legislative change for the protection of disabled minors. Chapter 6, on the other hand, presents the documentary film Planet of Snail as a particularly apt case study in ethical documentary and minoritarian filmmaking. In addition to discussing the transnational effort that went into making the film, the authors argue that Planet of Snail, as an example of “Barrier-Free cinema,” “makes a significant break from traditional cinematic representations of people living with disabilities” by highlighting the “relationship between human rights and the human sensorium” (128). Invoking Eunjung Kim’s “curative violence,” the authors deftly outline Korean society’s solution-based approach to disability rights legislation that have so far privileged a system of curing or “fixing,” rather than of ethical caring (139). The authors’ fluid and engaging prose is especially noticeable here and is particularly important for this chapter that delves into such ethical provocations. As they do in every chapter, the authors provide ample historical and social background, but readers may have benefited further from a deeper discussion on the state of rights, or lack thereof, designated specifically for the protection of the underaged (often termed “youth rights”), especially since the authors designate two chapters (3 and 5) to this “minor”—in both age and societal position—group, who are uniquely and oftentimes wholly dependent on the actions of adults.Part 4, “Representing Prisoners of the North and South,” continues the examination of ethical filmmaking practices, this time regarding the subject of political prisoners. Chapter 7 features Repatriation, a documentary film that eschews focus on former prisoners’ political affiliations or tortured pasts to instead foreground the director’s personal relationships with the subjects, emphasizing a “participatory mode” of documentary filmmaking that abides by the “ethics of encounter” (148). Chapter 8 veers slightly away from the focus on truthful portrayals by examining Camp 14: Total Control Zone, a hybridized documentary film that “blurs the line between history and fiction” with the use of illustrative storytelling (10). This was another illuminating section in which the authors’ treatment of animation as both mimetic and nonmimetic substitution, which can present a certain level of “truth” in addition to emotion and artistry, complicated more traditional methods of reading the prison film genre in new and surprising ways. This positioning of animation and film as “witness” to otherwise unpresentable crimes of history is particularly significant for any scholar working within the realms of memory or trauma, not just those in cinema or Korean studies.Part 5, “Migrant Worker Rights in Hybrid Documentaries,” seems to continue this line of inquiry into the subversive potential of imaginative storytelling techniques. Chapter 9 examines the meanings behind the film Scenery’s nonnarrative “absences,” rather than its creative additions. By examining the landscapes the migrant workers occupy, the spaces of “permanent temporariness,” as much as the human subjects themselves, the authors assert that the film responds to neoliberal and governmental injustices by promoting the “vacancy of image” as “no less artificial or dubious than narrative as representation of reality” (197). In chapter 10, the authors invoke Deleuze’s “power of the false” and read The City of Cranes, a mockumentary-style film featuring the industrial city of Incheon and its migrant workers, as an “audacious stylistic experimentation, which not only blurs the boundaries between documentary and fiction but also rejects truth claims related to the authenticity of images or the constructed notion of national identity” (216). Following chapter 4’s initial reference, this section returns to Deleuze and Guattari and also provides a clear-cut definition of “minoritarian cinema” as a cultural form that “crosses or unsettles boundaries between inside and outside, or the personal and the collective, while emphasizing processes of becoming (rather than being) through such migratory maneuvers” (187). Since this metaphysical positioning—of becoming over being—seems to underpin much of the book’s theoretical interventions, a more detailed outlining of ethical minoritarianism, perhaps even earlier in the book, may have aided readers further in delineating the parameters of rights-advocacy cinema.The authors use the final two chapters of Movie Minorities (part 6: “Nonhuman Rights in a Posthuman World”) as an ethical exploration of how far and broadly the human role must expand for the sake of rights advocacy by looking at specifically nonhuman subjects. Chapter 11 foregrounds the necessarily contradictory nature of animal rights—namely, that an animal’s rights depend upon the actions of humans—in order to emphasize the human capacity for self-reflection, what the authors see as the first step toward change. Similarly, chapter 12, taking its cue from Rosi Braidotti’s writings on the “posthuman condition,” which calls for a readjustment of the self-versus-other binary, ends the book with a speculative segment on the future of nonhuman (or artificially intelligent) rights and its impact on the formation of human rights and moral obligation in general.As the first English-language book to study the role of Korean film in the practice of social activism, Movie Minorities: Transnational Rights Advocacy and South Korean Cinema is a significant contribution to Korean cinema scholarship. The book’s conception of cinema as active agent, rather than simple tool, in the advocacy of human rights is significant not only for those in cinema studies but for all scholars whose work finds connections between civic society, culture, and the ethical provocation of the human condition. Joining a number of recent publications that examine Korean cinema’s affective and ethical sway, this book elevates Korean cinema scholarship with its interdisciplinary scope, accessible prose, and enlightened cultural interpretation that examines both local and transnational exchanges. Veering away from texts that may focus solely on filmic analysis, where affect remains a slippery term separate from real-world application, the book consistently provides the appropriate social, historical, and cultural contextualization, allowing readers sufficient opportunity to intervene in the scholarly debates. The book introduces a number of films that have never been studied at length in English and generously outlines the foundations of Korea’s advocative history, making it a must-read for both undergraduates and graduate students of Korean culture and society. In addition to enriching the study of Korean cinema, Movie Minorities deftly weaves together the fields of film genre studies, cultural studies, transnational studies, disability studies, and critical theory.