SFIAAFF: Behind Forgotten Eyes
We can't really say that we were happy to see Behind Forgotten Eyes at the SF Int'l Asian-Am Film Fest this year, which is a documentary about the experience of Korean "comfort women" forced into prostitution by the Japanese army in World War II, but we thought it was important to honor these women's stories and go see something that was pretty much guaranteed to be pretty upsetting.
The women's stories were pretty much to a one extremely disturbing, and the interview footage of Japanese veterans uncomfortably recounting their wartime sexual experiences was unsettling as well. The audience was in tears about halfway through and the crying level remained fairly constant until the credits rolled.
The movie, narrated by Lost's Yunjin Kim, definitely tells an important story in Asian and women's history that deserves to be heard, and outlines the women's ongoing quest for acknowledgment and apology on the world stage. However, there were plenty of elements in this movie that detracted from that message, which we'll get into after the jump.
For some reason, the filmmakers chose to illustrate these stories with what struck us as an extremely inappropriate animation of a typical comfort woman's biography, deliberately designed to look like a children's cartoon, as well as some extremely graphic photographs of women being raped (and of syphilitic men). Understood that both choices were intended to hit viewers in the gut with the horror of the situation -- but, you know, we were plenty horrified just by the stories we were hearing and as a result, the cartoon seemed insulting and the pictures just seemed kind of exploitative.
In addition, the filmmakers provided very few details about the women's actual lives and the social situations they faced, beyond their brothel experience. How did these women end up captured by the Japanese? Were they in fact kidnapped, or were they sold out by their community, as some claim? What were their lives in Japan like? Are there children of comfort women from the brothels? Some women alluded to what sounded like remarkable stories of resistance during the war, none of which are followed up by the interviewers. How did the women get back to Korea when the war ended? Did they remarry? What do their families and post-war children think?
Maybe this is just a displaced reaction to the extremely upsetting story of the comfort women that we're so irritated with the movie itself, but we left the movie with more questions than when we'd started, and with a vague level of irritation that instead of following up with what seemed like logical next questions of these women (of whom the remaining survivors are now in their 80s and 90s), the filmmakers spent all that money making a weird and creepy animation story instead.
Behind Forgotten Eyes screens again next Saturday, 3/22, in San Jose.