MANSHIN : TEN THOUSAND SPIRITS
HD film, documenrary, 104 min., 2013
Director: PARK Chan-kyong, Producer: KIM Min-kyung(MK), HAN Sun-hee, Screenplay: PARK Chan-kyong, Cinematographer, JEE Yune-jeong, LEE Sun-young, YOO Ji-sun, Lighting Director: HONG Myung-soo, NAM Ki-bong, Editor: UM Yoonzu, Production Designer: BAEK Gyeong-in, Make-up: KIM Hyun-jeong, Wardlobe: PARK So-young, Original Music: LEE Tae-won, Sound: SEO Young-joon, CGI Effect: LEE Jeon-hyung (4th Creative Party)
Film still, 2013
Kim Keum-wha(b. 1931) is one of Korea’s greatest shaman born in Hwanghae Province, North Korea. She has been conserving the Korean shamanism tradition since she was possessed by spirits at 17 through an initiation rite called Naerim-gut. She then trained to practice traditional Guts and displayed outstanding talent in singing and dancing. She’s been honored as an intangible national treasure of Korea. However her impressive career accompanies the history of oppression on shamanism throughout the Japanese colonial period, Korean War, and Saemaeul(New Community) Movement. Korean Shamanism has been continuously trivialized by superstition. The film describes the modern history of Korea in detail through her eyes reflecting pain and suffering of people. It also reveals the power of forgiveness and reconciliation of Korean shamanism, while displaying different kinds of Gut in relation with certain periods of modern Korea. The film surpasses the border between past and present, south and north, city and country, this life and afterlife, and reality and fantasy while it reconstructs the life of Kim Keum-Wha through reenactment, footages, Korean traditional music and mythical fantasy scenes.
Korean Shamanism has a long history of oppression and mistreatment being attacked by Confucianism in Chosun Dynasty and by foreign religion and Ideology in the republic era. All kinds of suffering and pain one experiences until she becomes a shaman is in a way a qualification in order to understand the sufferings of others. Shamans indentify with pains of others better than priests of any other religions. In terms of culture, I would like to present Korean fantasy as a fully commanding official culture, which has been handed down by the meticulous religious rites of Korean Shamanism, Gut. The film also employs styles of documentary and fantasy, to provide a specific angle to focus on significant moments of Korean modern history by combining different kinds of Guts with several periods that Kim Keum-wha experienced from Japanese colonial time, Korean War, to Saemaeul(New Community) Movement and present. This is a kind of ‘Gut-Film’ rather than a film ‘about’ Gut.
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2015 2nd Wildflower Film Awards Korea, Best Director - Documentaries
2014 Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival, Fasken Martineau Best Feature Film or Video Award
2014 New York Asian Film Festival, Closing film
2014 New Vision Award in Muju Film Festival
2013 5th DMZ Korean Int'l Documentary Film Festival, Opening film
