Habitual Sadness in Japan

[Aaron Gerow]

Janine wrote,

>I have one more thing to relate from the Berlin festival. The Forum
>showed two documentaries by South Korean filmmaker Byung Young-Joo, NAZN
>MOKSORI 1 and 2 (THE MURMURING and HABITUAL SADNESS are their English
>titles). They deal with the present lives of a group of Korean women who
>were forced into prostitution by the Japanese Army during WW2 and became
>political activists for their own cause in the 1980s. In the Q&A session
>following the screening the director told the audience that she had been
>to Japan recently to promote HABITUAL SADNESS there. At one occasion she
>said a rightist turned up to disturb the showing of the film. She said
>the guy actually helped the promotion because his provocation gave them
>more public attention than they had hoped for. Have those of you in
>Japan heard of the incident and would you be able to tell to what extent
>it was reported in the media? Thanks in advance.

The incident actually took place with the screening of _The Murmuring_, 
not _Habitual Sadness_.  The film was shown at BOX Higashi Nakano about 2 
years ago and a man sprayed the audience with what seemed to be a fire 
extinguisher during one of the first showings (he quickly escaped and was 
not caught).  The incident was reported in most of the major newspapers, 
on some TV channels, and some more specialist magazines did longer 
articles.  The distributor, Pandora, also collected names in support of 
the film and there was some publicity about that.  I don't know to what 
extent all the publicity helped the film, but I'm sure it did some good 
because the film's run in Japan was largely a success.  _Habitual_ just 
opened at BOX on February 14th, but as far as I have heard, there has 
been no incident this time around.

You can find out more about the film on the Pandora homepage:

http://www02.so-net.or.jp/~pandora/nanumu1.html

Aaron Gerow
YNU