South Korea’s dictators are dead; the quarrels about them are not. The latest battlefield is a cinema screen. On September 29th Lee Jong-bae, a former Seoul city councillor, stood outside the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency and announced that he had filed a criminal complaint against four people behind “Assassin(s)”, a film released six days earlier about the 1974 shooting of Yuk Young-soo, the wife of Park Chung-hee, then the country’s strongman president. His charge: defamation by the publication of false facts, including defamation of the dead.
The accused are Kim Won-guk, chief executive of Hive Media Corp, which planned and produced the film; Hur Jin-ho, its director; and Kwon Ki-jun and Lee Ji-min, who wrote the screenplay. The history their film revisits is, officially, settled. At a National Liberation Day ceremony on August 15th 1974, Mun Se-gwang, a Japan-based Korean, fired at Mr Park. Investigators at the time concluded that Mr Mun had acted on instructions from North Korea and Chongryon, the pro-Pyongyang association of Koreans in Japan. The bullet meant for the president missed him and killed Ms Yuk instead.
The film does not simply accept that verdict. According to the complaint, it raises questions about the origin of the bullet that struck Ms Yuk and about who really stood behind the attack. Mr Lee objects even to the title: the plural “Assassin(s)”, he argues, implies gunmen other than Mr Mun. The sequencing of scenes hinting at the involvement of the authorities of the day, the complaint says, steers audiences towards believing that Mr Park himself was behind the plot or at least complicit in it — a notion it calls baseless. It adds that airing falsehoods about the dead man damages the social standing of his surviving family enough to constitute a separate offence against them.
Mr Lee also aimed at the living. Lawmakers from the ruling party who have defended the film, he said, should first answer whether they would defend the same sort of imaginative licence applied to the death of Roh Moo-hyun, a liberal former president, or to the Gwangju uprising of 1980. The point is a shrewd one: in South Korea historical memory is sorted by political tribe, and artistic freedom tends to be defended most warmly when it flatters one’s own side.
The film’s makers deny smuggling politics into the multiplex. In a statement issued the day before the complaint, the production team insisted the movie “was not made to deny or distort established facts” and rejected suggestions of a political motive. South Korea’s defamation law is unusually broad — truth alone is not always a defence, and the dead may be defamed — which makes such complaints a familiar instrument in the country’s history wars.
The police must now decide whether there is a case to answer. Whatever they conclude, the episode proves two things. A half-century-old murder can still sell tickets. And in South Korea, to challenge the official story of that murder is still to invite a knock from the state.