Movie Minorities
Transnational Rights Advocacy and South Korean Cinema
by Hye Seung Chung and David Scott Diffrient
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Book Presentation:
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.
About the authors:
HYE SEUNG CHUNG is an associate professor of film and media studies at Colorado State University and the author of Hollywood Asian: Philip Ahn and the Politics of Cross-Ethnic Performance, Kim Ki-duk, and Hollywood Diplomacy: Film Regulation, Foreign Relations, and East Asian Representations (Rutgers University Press). She is the coauthor of Movie Migrations: Transnational Genre Flows and South Korean Cinema (Rutgers University Press).
DAVID SCOTT DIFFRIENT is a professor of film and media studies at Colorado State University and the author of M*A*S*H and Omnibus Films: Theorizing Transauthorial Cinema. He is the coauthor of Movie Migrations: Transnational Genre Flows and South Korean Cinema (Rutgers University Press).
Press Reviews:
"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."
— Dong Hoon Kim
"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."
— Steve Choe
> From the same authors:
Cinema under National Reconstruction (2024)
State Censorship and South Korea's Cold War Film Culture
Hollywood Diplomacy (2020)
Film Regulation, Foreign Relations, and East Asian Representations
Subject: Sociology
Movie Migrations (2015)
Transnational Genre Flows and South Korean Cinema
Hollywood Asian (2006)
Philip Ahn and the Politics of Cross-Ethnic Performance
Subject: Actor > Philip Ahn
> On a related topic:
The Late and Post-Dictatorship (2025)
Cinephilia Boom and Art Houses in South Korea
The Korean War and Postmemory Generation (2023)
Contemporary Korean Arts and Films
Two Lenses on the Korean Ethos (2015)
Key Cultural Concepts and Their Appearance in Cinema
by Keumsil Kim Yoon and Bruce Williams
Pop Empires (2019)
Transnational and Diasporic Flows of India and Korea
Dir. S. Heijin Lee, Monika Mehta and Robert Ji-Song Ku
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