BUT WHERE ARE YOU REALLY FROM? MISHA ZAKHAROV RESPONDS TO ALISA BERGER’S THREE BORDERS

In the late 19th to early 20th century, many Koreans fled northern Korea for the Far East of the Russian Empire, escaping Japanese occupation. They settled in cities like Ussuriysk and Vladivostok, gradually assimilating by learning the Russian language and contributing to local agriculture while embracing Bolshevism after the Soviet Revolution. In 1937, these people, who came to be known under the self-designated name of Koryo-saram or Koryoin (literally "Korean person"), were forcibly displaced to Central Asia as part of a secret racist operation launched by Stalin’s government, which was rearranging various populations and indigenous peoples due to perceived “anti-Soviet activities”. The deportation of Koryo-saram was the first instance of Soviet ethnic deportation of an entire nationality. Thousands died during the transfer, and many more starved to death upon arrival in Central Asia. Those who survived—thanks in no small part to the help of Uzbeks and Kazakhs—formed a thriving community that eventually spread throughout the Soviet Union and beyond. Devastatingly, many Koryo-saram who until recently resided in Ukraine have been displaced once again due to the full-scale Russian invasion, forming resistance both within Ukraine (see Vitaliy Kim) and abroad (see Olek Shyn).

Over a century of their existence, Koryo-saram have developed their own cuisine, widely appreciated in Central Asia and beyond, as well as their own literature (Anatoli Kim), fashion (J.KIM), music (most prominently represented by the Ariran Ensemble and rock star Viktor Tsoi), and cinema (notably Revenge (1989), directed by Kazakh filmmaker Yermek Shinarbayev, which is included in the prestigious Criterion Collection). The archives amassed by Korean-Uzbek photographer Victor An, in particular, offer rich insight into the layered culture of Koryoin. However, their history and culture remain a hidden narrative, known primarily to experts in Central Asian or Korean studies.

As a curator of this year’s Screening Rights, I am immensely proud to present audiences in the West Midlands with this narrative through the screening of Three Borders, an intensely personal family memoir by Germany-based Jewish-Korean filmmaker Alisa Berger. The film focuses on the multiple lines—both ethnic and geographic—that her family and Berger herself, who was born in Dagestan, raised in Ukraine, and is now based in Germany, crossed during their migrations throughout the 20th century. While my own story is different (I’m not a descendant of Koryo-saram but the child of a South Korean father and a white Russian mother, born in the 1990s), I cannot help but identify with the experiences of Koryo-saram. Some of my dearest friends are Koryo-saram, and in autumn 2022, I was deeply moved when I attended chuseok—the Korean harvest holiday—at the Korean Cultural Centre in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, and saw hundreds of Koryoin people gathered together.

As part of my ongoing, on-again, off-again personal inquiry into the filmic representations of Koryo-saram culture, I have gathered many examples of under-seen cinematic and moving image works. Below is my list, shared in response to Alisa Berger’s film, with the hope that these stories will be disseminated further:

• Kolkhoz Avant-Garde (1946), a piece of Soviet propaganda that glorifies and co-opts Koryoin’s agricultural achievements, comfortably and insidiously bypassing the circumstances of their displacement to Central Asia;
• Ariran Ensemble (1973), a recorded performance of the acclaimed Koryo ensemble;
• Rashid Nugmanov’s cult banger The Needle (1988), featuring Viktor Tsoi—the Russian-Kazakh frontman of the rock band Kino and arguably the most badass Koryo-saram of all time;
• Yermek Shinarbayev’s Revenge (1989), the only Central Asian film in the Criterion Collection and one of the few films featuring an almost exclusively Koryo-saram cast;
• Koryo-saram (1993), Korean-Kazakh director Lavrenti Song’s series of personal interviews with people from various backgrounds—Ukrainian, Kazakh, Russian, and Kurdish—who have come to know and communicate in the Koryo dialect of Korean. The interview with Marija—a Ukrainian woman adopted by Koreans after World War II, who speaks the Koryo dialect and a bit of Russian with a Korean accent—struck me particularly hard;
• Deportation (1997), Koryoin director Vadim Pak’s historiography of the forced displacement of Soviet Koreans;
• Koryo Saram: The Unreliable People (2007), the now-classic documentary by Y. David Chung and Matt Dibble, which uses Stalin’s perception of Koryoin as traitors and essentially unreliable people as its point of departure;
• Heart of Snow, Heart of Blood (2014), Sound of Nomad: Koryo Arirang (2017), and Goodbye My Love, NK (2019), Korean director Kim Soyoung’s Exile Trilogy dedicated to Koryo-saram. I found the third part of the trilogy, which narrates the story of eight film students from North Korea who studied at VGIK (All-Union State Institute of Cinematography, the premier film school in the Soviet Union), sought asylum in the USSR, and eventually became asylum seekers, particularly moving as a film worker and political immigrant myself.

GUEST CURATOR’S BIO

Misha Zakharov is a russian-born, queer-identifying person of Korean descent (he/they), a political immigrant, and a London-based author and film worker. He is currently completing a practice-based PhD project in Film & TV Studies at the University of Warwick, as part of which he curates Screening Rights, West Midlands’ festival of socially engaged and formally innovative cinema, and researches film festivals as sites of (un)learning and solidarity.