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| A scene from "Equality Road 1110" / Courtesy of the filmmakers |
By Jon Dunbar
It's been over 15 years since an anti-discrimination law was first proposed in Korea, and the National Assembly has still been unable to pass a bill while the country's most socially marginalized communities continue to suffer.
Hopes were raised that the bill would be passed after the 2017 election of liberal former President Moon Jae-in and the 2020 legislative elections which gave Moon's Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) a significant majority in the Assembly. But the bill continued to flounder.
Throughout this time, activists and representatives of socially vulnerable communities continued urging the government to do its job. Meanwhile, they faced counter-protests from largely Christian groups, who claimed that the law's passage would result in "reverse discrimination," punishing them for their views and hate speech toward sexual minorities.
In 2020, the South Korean Coalition for Anti-Discrimination Legislation led a 30-day march from Busan all the way up to the National Assembly in Seoul. Two human rights activists named Miryu and Jong-gul made the journey to hold the Assembly accountable after it failed to respond before the deadline to a petition in support of the bill, which received over 100,000 signatures on the now-defunct National Assembly online petition website.
Their journey was documented by filmmakers and released last year in the form of an omnibus documentary featuring the work of five filmmakers.
The members of Crazy Multiply, a local curative arts collective, wrote new captions in English for the film, and plan to offer a screening with English subtitles on Saturday.
"We feel that [passage of the law] is the bare minimum, and in many ways the first step towards the creation of a safe, just and inclusive society," Crazy Multiply organizers said in a statement written for The Korea Times. "So it is a basic law, but incredibly necessary in the sense that it will allow all of us living in South Korea to see the oppression we experience in a more interconnected way. Be it sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, ageism, ableism, classism or others, the passing of this act will shine a light on the structures that maintain and reproduce these violences and also give us all a way to act stronger together through our differences."
The film puts discrimination under the microscope, and one conclusion many interviewees reach, upon reflecting on their lives, is that certain experiences they've faced were in fact discrimination.
"Discrimination is not an isolated event people are subjected to, but it is something that is normalized in too many areas of day-to-day life," Crazy Multiply said. "So many forms of violence have been normalized in day-to-day life, and at times we are subjected to further trauma by having to convince others of our experience."
In one scene in the movie, an organizer at DdingDong LGBTQ Youth Crisis Support Center details their experience hurrying to a hospital emergency room to provide support for a teenager in need of help. But the organizer, who is transgender, had trouble convincing the staff of their identity due to gender differences indicated on their ID and presented in person, and what should have been a quick and simple check-in ended up taking 30 to 40 minutes.
The anti-discrimination law would also help foreign nationals in Korea, which is a big part of the reason why Crazy Multiply saw the need for the subtitled screening. One foreign interviewee in the film explains how he was unclear about the details of how the law would pertain to his experience as an immigrant.
"This is the general feeling most non-Korean citizens have when it comes to their own rights while living in Korea, and why many immigrants, migrants and refugees are unable to defend themselves legally in situations where they are taken advantage of," Crazy Multiply said. "It speaks to the need for more transparency and inclusivity for non-Korean speakers about who and what this law actually encompasses, which would also create more advocacy for the law overall."
The main reason for the non-passage of the anti-discrimination act seems to come from opposition from the Christian far right, a powerful minority in Korean society.
"Opponents to the passing of the Anti-Discrimination Act put at the forefront of their arguments the common conservative dogmatisms pertaining to homophobia, transphobia and misogyny, a lot of which are rooted in narrow-minded views of Christianity," Crazy Multiply members said.
"They would use the term 'true anti-discrimination act' in their discourse, attempting to negate the validity of the Anti-Discrimination Act that we are working towards passing. This however attests to a general misunderstanding of the Anti-Discrimination Act on the part of those who are opposed."
Some members of Crazy Multiply, which includes both Koreans and foreign nationals, got a different picture of the act's implications for the religious, when they attended solidarity hunger strike sit-in protests led by Miryu and Jong-gul, held earlier this year before the end of Moon's term and the inauguration of President Yoon Suk-yeol.
"We saw that there were multiple leaders of various religions including Christianity in support of the Anti-Discrimination Act," they said of their experiences at the protests. "Oftentimes we would consider the fact that the opposition would cease to exist as soon as they realized that this law would benefit them too."
The 48-minute documentary concludes with a scene of the two activists walking together with many supporters toward the end of their 30-day march. They say the government's strategy has been to tire out the protesters, and ask the supporters accompanying them if anybody feels tired, to which everyone replies that they are not.
"Equality Road 1110" will have one screening starting at 7 p.m., at KioskKiosk III in Sewoon Makers Cube, on the newly constructed third-floor terrace west of the southernmost tower in the Sewoon complex in downtown Seoul. The film will contain Korean and English closed captions and the venue is wheelchair-accessible. Afterward, there will be a 30-minute Q&A session with film director Kim Seol-hae and Mong, co-executive chairperson of the Coalition for Anti-Discrimination Legislation. As space will be limited, registration is required. Visit Crazy Multiply's website for more information and for a sign-up link.
