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This film, which local historiography of Korean documentary cinema has regarded as the “prototype of video activism,” documents the struggles of tenants against eviction due to the large-scale demolition and beautification of dilapidated houses in the old towns of Seoul in preparation for the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Kim Dong-won’s use of the video camera as a tool to film the tenants while living among them for five years fulfilled activism’s demand for a newsreel that would make public their precarious lives neglected by mainstream news outlets. The film’s collaborative processes satisfied the participatory ideal of the committed documentary to transcend the boundaries between a filmmaker and the subjects, between film and social reality, and between production and reception.

The film charts a young female artist-filmmaker’s creative reinvention of the essayistic inquiry into the Cold War and the postcolonial origins of Yongsan Garrison in Seoul (the former headquarters of the US military forces stationed in Korea). This is done through a rich array of images and documents, and through her subjectivity that shuffles between that of a quasi-historian, a collector and a player of Pokémon Go. Reflecting the condition in which our consciousness of space and time, as well as our memory, are fundamentally restructured by dense digital networks, platforms and interfaces, Jeong Yeo-reum offers a contemporary take on how Korean documentary cinema has dynamically expanded its technical and aesthetic boundaries since the early 21st century while also renewing its longstanding commitment to reality and history.