[SECTION 4] Her Time / November 4th?9th

Tour of Duty

Korea, 2013, 150min, Color, HD

KIM Dong-ryeong / PARK Gyeong-tae

거미의 땅
There remains only silence in a US military camp town in the northern part of Gyeonggi province that will be torn down any time soon. In the town, three women are still living with pains engraved in their bodies. Aunt Bobby who used to make burgers in Seonyu-ri for thirty years; Ms. Park In-soon who used to collect scraps and draw paintings on them in the abandoned narrow alleys of Bbat-bul, Uijeongbu; and Ms. Ahn Sungja who is half-Korean and half-African American. Following the pieces of their memories, the film travels into the forgotten town to reveal the truth left behind. Tour of Duty is an homage to the disappearing US military town and three surviving women as witnesses of all time. The directors focus mainly on the lives of these women in their own narrative ways to remember the camp town. It is an attempt to face the fateful wound returning beyond space and time through their journey.
 
KIM Dong-ryeong made her first documentary American Alley (2008), a story of migrant foreign entertainers and old Korean ladies trying to survive in old camp towns. It received the Ogawa Shinsuke Prize from the Yamagata Film Festival in 2009. Her works constantly deal with memory and space engraved into the individual body.
PARK Gyeong-tae made his first documentary Me and the Owl in 2003, in which ‘camp town’ women expose their faces and offer their perspectives on the US military presence in the country and on Korean society. In 2005, he made There is (2005), in which his camera solitarily meets the loneliness and anger of one Amerasian, Myungsoo, a son of the US military comfort woman.