Koryo Saram: The Unreliable People (2006)

Film screening with introduction by Y. David Chung, Co-Director

In 1937, Stalin began a campaign of massive ethnic cleansing and forcibly deported everyone of Korean origin living in the coastal provinces of the Far East Russia near the border of North Korea to the unsettled steppe country of Central Asia 3700 miles away.  This story of 180,000 Koreans who became political pawns during the Great Terror is the central focus of this film. With political scientist and executive producer Meredith Jung-En Woo and cameraman Matt Dibble, Chung traveled to film the survivors of the deportation and their descendants who still live in Kazakhstan today.

Koryo Saram (the Soviet Korean phrase for Korean person) tells the harrowing saga of survival in the open steppe country and the sweep of Soviet history through the eyes of these deported Koreans, who were designated by Stalin as an "unreliable people" and enemies of the state. Through recently uncovered archival footage and new interviews, the film follows the deportees' history of integrating into the Soviet system while working under punishing conditions in Kazakhstan, a country which became a concentration camp of exiled people from throughout the Soviet Union. Today, in the context of Kazakhstan's recent emergence as a rapidly modernizing, independent state, the story of the Kazakhstani-Koreans situated within this ethnically diverse country has resonance with the experience of many Americans and how they have assimilated to form new cultures in our world of increasingly displaced people.

These events are co-sponsored by the Center for European and Eurasian Studies and the Center for Korean Studies at UCLA.
 
For more information about these events and the Asia Institute Central Asia Initiative,, visit www.international.ucla.edu/asia, or contact Nick Menzies at nmenzies@international.ucla.edu