Rights advocacy has become a prominent facet of South Korea’s increasingly transnational motion picture output, especially following the 1998 presidential inauguration of Kim Dae-jung, a former political prisoner and victim of human rights abuses who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000. Today it is not unusual to see a big-budget production about the pursuit of social justice or the protection of civil liberties contending for the top spot at the box office. With that cultural shift has come a diversification of film subjects, which range from undocumented workers’ rights to the sexual harassment experienced by women to high-school bullying to the struggles among people with disabilities to gain inclusion within a society that has transformed significantly since winning democratic freedoms three decades ago. Combining in-depth textual analyses of films such as Bleak Night, Okja, Planet of Snail, Repatriation, and Silenced with broader historical contextualization, Movie Minorities offers the first English-language study of South Korean cinema’s role in helping to galvanize activist social movements across several identity-based categories.
 

"“Movie Minorities addresses a gaping hole in the literature and offers an original contribution to Korean film studies. This book is groundbreaking in multiple ways.”" - University of Oregon, author of Eclipsed Cinema: The Film Culture of Colonial Korea

"Movie Minorities is a pleasure to read. I am thrilled that this work will introduce a number of key political, ethical, and historical categories into our understanding of contemporary Korean cinema." - author of Sovereign Violence: Ethics and South Korean Cinema in the New Millennium

"“Movie Minorities addresses a gaping hole in the literature and offers an original contribution to Korean film studies. This book is groundbreaking in multiple ways.”" - University of Oregon, author of Eclipsed Cinema: The Film Culture of Colonial Korea

"Movie Minorities is a pleasure to read. I am thrilled that this work will introduce a number of key political, ethical, and historical categories into our understanding of contemporary Korean cinema." - author of Sovereign Violence: Ethics and South Korean Cinema in the New Millennium