Movie Minorities: Transnational Rights Advocacy and South Korean Cinema

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...