Synopsis of Documentary

Those Forgotten Still Remember
Grace Yoo explores untold stories of the Korean War
By Corina Knoll
Photograph by Jimmy Lee

SAN FRANCISCO - Grace Yoo hopes people will realize that there is no such thing as a forgotten war.
In May, the first-time film producer will premiere “Stories Untold: Memories of Korean War Survivors,” a documentary that addresses the Korean experience during what is often considered “The Forgotten War,” at Visual Communications’ 19th annual Asian Pacific Film and Video Festival in Los Angeles.

In 1950, North Korean forces invaded South Korea and seized Seoul, after which followed three years of devastation and chaos on the Korean peninsula. Because the United States had just been involved in World War II, the U.S. government was reluctant to acknowledge its involvement in yet another war and labeled what was happening abroad as a “conflict.” But, as Yoo points out in her film, the repercussions of the so-called “conflict” were devastating and terrible: 5 million people died, 9 million were displaced, 150,000 women were widowed and 100,000 children were orphaned.

Yoo, 35, who is an assistant professor at San Francisco State University (SFSU) in the Asian American Studies department, often noticed that her students, many of whom are Korean American, were ignorant of their own families’ experiences during the Korean War.

“I think a lot of times the first generation doesn’t talk about this war, and so our generation doesn’t know about this, explains Yoo, who was born in Los Angeles. “I think our parents and our grandparents, in a sense, wanted to shelter us from this horrendous experience. My dad lost two brothers from this war, and he didn’t really talk about it until I started doing research in this area.”

But it wasn’t until the death of her aunt and the birth of her son that Yoo decided to unearth memories from “The Forgotten War” and document them on film.

“My aunt had just passed away. She was 85 years old, and she’d raised three of her sons as a widow. Her husband had died during the war. I was so sad that she had passed away and I didn’t know fully her whole story.

“My son was born, and I felt this incredible need to document the
experiences of older Koreans. I wanted to know how in the hell were they able to raise their kids in the midst of this crazy war because I had just given birth, and raising a kid was like the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

Yoo, who had no film experience, wrote about her idea and submitted a grant to SFSU that caught the eye of Sulgi Kim, a Korean-Japanese cinema student who offered to lend his film abilities to the project.
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