Cancelled: The DMZ

A photo-montage recapping the violence of the war opens the film. It ends with scenes from the 1953 armistice talks at Panmunjom. From this high plateau of international politics we jump into the body of the film, now seeing a scruffy little girl wandering through an empty landscape. She soon meets a boy decked out in tattered bits of GI uniform. She is timid, just wants to find her mother; he plays mr. cool but his façade won’t hold for long.

Park Sang-ho gained permission to film on the southern side of the DMZ (there were armed soldiers just out of camera shot). He wavered between making a documentary or straight narrative story. The children’s actions and words are clearly meant to comment on the political context. This includes black humour, as when the attempt to make frog-potato stew almost causes an international incident.