The Attorney | Jingmei Junior High School
Films screened
The Attorney
A historical drama based on real events: the Burim reading-group case in Busan during South Korea's period of state terror in the 1980s. Immediately after the Gwangju Uprising, the Chun Doo-hwan military government, seeking to stabilise Busan, trampled the law and suppressed the legitimate rights of citizens, having prosecutors and police fabricate charges to convict innocent university students and make an example of them. A lawyer who had previously had nothing but contempt for the democracy movement comes, through conducting the defence, to understand what dictatorship does to law, to human rights and to a country. Holding to the values of his profession, he resists every form of pressure, defends the students' freedom, and goes on to join South Korea's democracy movement.
The Attorney is based on the 1981 Burim incident, a starting point of South Korea's democracy movement, and on the life of the late President Roh Moo-hyun. It drew more than ten million admissions within a month of release, breaking box-office records and ranking eighth in South Korean film history. The history it describes resembles Taiwan's own White Terror closely enough that its reckoning with the past invites us to reconsider the road Taiwan should take.