Red Maria 2 (2015)

Red Maria 2 2015 / 레드마리아2 2015 / Redeu Maria 2

At the end of her earlier work ‟Red Maria,‟ filmmaker Kyung Sun said that our society was not yet prepared to accept the tales of sex workers. Her recent work ‟Red Maria 2‟ is a film that hears their stories in earnest and suggests that it has become time for our society to give an ear to their stories. For the film, the filmmaker heard the stories of sex workers and the words of Korean and Japanese researchers who claimed that the issue of military sexual slavery needed to be accessed from a new viewpoint, and then wove the two stories together in the film using a crosscutting technique. This crosscutting may be a cinematic device suggesting that it is time for us to overcome the border/discrimination between Korean women and Japanese women, and forced sexual slaves and prostitutes. Isn’t the image of military sexual slaves as innocent women (an image that is fixed in Korean society for military sexual slaves) a device that makes someone excluded from the area of the victims and that deprives them of their qualification and right to tell their pain? Isn’t it basically the same as a device that blocks the appeal of sex workers for their qualifications and rights from reaching the concern of our society? To break away from the ideology of patriarchy’s chastity that makes someone’s pain not be heard, ‟Red Maria 2‟ above all suggests us to listen to all members of society with an open mind. (Source: DMZDocs.com)