A LITTLE POND (Korea, 2010)
Directed by: Lee Sang-Woo
Starring: Moon Sung-Keun, Choi Jong-Ryul, Kim Nae-Ha, Shin Myung-Cheol, Lee Dae-Yun, Jeon Hye-Jin, Kim Seung-Wook, Choi Duk-Moon

No one can agree on what happened at South Korea's No Gun Ri Bridge  between June 26 and 29, 1950. The original 1999 press account claims that panicked US soldiers massacred 300 Korean refugees under orders from commanders who believed North Korean spies were hiding in the group. Dueling books published in the early 2000’s discredited some of these eye witnesses, then validated them, lowered the casualty count, then raised the casualty count and finally just settled for accusing each other of “raping history.” Was No Gun Ri the worst military massacre of civillians until My Lai? Was it a minor incident blown out of proportion? Did it even happen?

The Americans have had their say, and now it's Korea's turn. Impossibly controversial, A LITTLE POND is an all-star film that has been denounced by South Koreans as North Korean propaganda, it’s been denounced by Americans as vicious lies and it’s been denounced by film critics as nationalist propaganda. And this international firestorm has been sparked by a small, quiet, unassuming movie that recreates the incident in meticulous detail but refuses to take sides.

Shot with a neutral, God’s-eye-view camera, A LITTLE POND begins gently, like a Hou Hsiao-hsien homage to the quiet, rural village of No Gun Ri, on a sleepy summer's day. Eschewing main characters, the camera glides lightly from conversation to conversation, family to family, until the interconnected social web has been traced. The girls in summer school can't stand the disgusting boys. The village elders are hanging out at the crossroads, playing chess and gossiping. Mrs. Min is mad at her husband again and is stomping down the road with the kids, pretending to leave him. It’s a regular day and no one’s even completely convinced that a war is actually going on.

And suddenly there's a massacre. It comes out of nowhere, it makes no sense, and it casually, brutally, tears the village to shreds. It’s the closest cinema can come to the victim’s experience of wartime atrocity and it is as savage as it is unexpected. As much as this film is criticized in the press, Director Lee Sang-Woo doesn’t pile on the choirs of angels, slo-mo shots of carnage, or orphaned children crying for their parents. Instead he shows a village, then there’s a massacre, then there is a village again. Because life does go on, harvest time comes again, children keep growing up and survivors move on with their lives. Director Lee erases the stardom of his all-star cast, and instead makes a movie where the biggest character is the Korean countryside. And when its face is splattered with blood it feels like blasphemy.