The Role of Power

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In A Single Spark, Jeon Tail commits suicide by self-immolation on the thoroughfare, calling for compliance with labour laws.  While he symbolizes Korea’s labour movement during the period from 1965 to 1970, his life and death give us a chance to re-think about a contemporary issue even now. Amid appalling work conditions, he reads a law book, asks government for help, forms an association, and talks to reporters. When nothing seems to change, he decides to make the ultimate sacrifice to publicize his cause. . Five years later, people including a young couple follow Jeon Tail’s path. But conditions still don’t change. The pregnant wife gets beaten and harassed from the repressive regime. Her husband, Kim Yong-su, is on the run, not being able to take care of his pregnant wife. The film ends with a list of more than 7000 people’s names who donated money to see that the film was made and distributed. This heavily demonstrates how much the people wanted to criticize authority, the intellectuals. In the Korea history, after its independence from Japan, intellectuals had absolute power and involved with whatever was going on in society, but what have they actually done for the country? To raise this question again, a lot of Koreans cooperated with each other to produce the film. About 40 years have passed since then. There still remain a lot of social and political issues we need to deal with. We cannot rely on film production anymore since it is now very common for filmmakers to tackle those issues in their films. As Jeon Tail had wanted it to occur from a long time ago, labour laws were finally implemented to protect workers, but people are still holding a demonstration about a remaining social and political issues. It would be almost impossible to satisfy  their desires fully, but I wanna ask again, “what is the role of authority?” Does one of us has to sacrifice again, in order to make them listen to us?