[BODY]
The film "My Name Is" quietly traces how the violence of Korea's modern history has seeped into individual lives and repeated itself across generations, using names — the "markers" that distinguish one person from another — as its lens. The film's finest moment comes when the countless names that shared in erased history and suffering are called aloud on screen.
Set in 1998, the film centers on a mother, Choi Jung-soon (Yeom Hye-ran), who has lost all memory from before age nine, and her 18-year-old son, Lee Young-ok (Shin Woo-bin). It opens with Young-ok's school life, where violence runs so rampant one might mistake bullying for the film's main subject. Living under a girl's name in a violent, male-dominated society is hard on Young-ok. Easygoing by nature, he hands his mother an application to change his old-fashioned feminine name "Young-ok" to "Min-jong," only to be refused flatly.
From this point, the film slowly reveals that sealed within Jung-soon's locked memories and the name "Young-ok" lie the full weight of Korea's modern history — the Jeju April 3 Incident, the Vietnam War, the Gwangju Democratization Movement — delivering a profound resonance. Jung-soon suddenly collapses every spring from a chronic illness, and when a psychiatrist (Kim Gyu-ri) asks, "Why did you give your son a girl's name?" she responds with a curious smile, "That name just came to me." By the time the audience realizes all of this is a metaphor for survival and pain endured through an age of violence, the chest tightens. The anguish of those who could survive only by forgetting, as if nothing had ever happened, is not someone else's pain but our own.
Young-ok's school life, which occupies much of the film, functions as a cinematic device revealing how the history of violence persists and repeats across generations in different forms. Though the year is 1998 — past 1987 — the violent culture endures, and the history that must be remembered continues to be erased. Gyeong-tae, a transfer student from Seoul born with a "golden spoon," fosters violence and even manipulates the class presidency vote to his liking. He orchestrates public opinion so that Young-ok, rather than the longtime class president Ko Min-soo, is elected.
The film expands scenes that appear to be personal violence into a microcosm of social violence, showing that the same mechanisms of force and power operate inside the classroom. One particularly striking scene depicts "erased history." When a student asks, "Why don't you properly explain the Jeju April 3 Incident?" the teacher refuses, saying, "It's not on the college entrance exam." That line is not mere ignorance but a revelation of how history has been structurally excluded from memory. The film points out that history has not vanished — it is being excluded through "the way it is not taught."
Director Chung Ji-young's restrained direction and the performances of Yeom Hye-ran and the rest of the cast heighten the pain by contrasting sharply with the tragic modern history. Rather than pushing emotion, the film builds its narrative plainly, filling in silence and pained expressions in place of explanation. That restraint becomes the very element that creates greater sorrow, lingering resonance and impact.
Director Chung, long called a master of realism for works grounded in history and reality such as "North Korean Partisan in South Korea," "White Badge," "Unbowed" and "Black Money," is being credited this time with sublimating history and personal suffering through the aesthetics of poetic realism. Rather than reproducing reality as is, he renders tragic fate and the human interior with his own lyrical, poetic expression. In particular, the name Young-ok becomes a metaphor for hidden history, deliberately erased memory, and the pain that persists nonetheless. A male student in 1998 living under the old-fashioned feminine name Young-ok — "Young-ok" stands as a metaphor for the most vulnerable beings who endure an age of violence.
In the end, the film poses a weighty question: "A name unremembered is the same as a history that never existed."
The film is based on a winning entry in a screenplay competition on the April 3 Incident. Chung is said to have initially declined the directing offer. He decided to take it on only after the original writer told him he could freely alter the script. "The Jeju April 3 Incident is mentioned only briefly in history textbooks," Chung said. "The reason few films have seriously dealt with it is that everyone assumed someone else would." He added, "I've heard many times that people were preparing such projects, but they never got made — because it's a subject that doesn't attract investment." Even after committing to direct, raising the budget was no easy task. He ran a crowdfunding campaign in which 9,778 people contributed 404.27 million won. He then secured a 1 billion won loan from the Korea Credit Guarantee Fund and an additional 800 million won through a Korean Film Council production support program. "Who would willingly invest money in a film like this?" he said. "So I asked here and there and set up a production steering committee. I told people, 'Please join the committee so we can make a film like this,' and most agreed gladly." As countless names scroll at the end of the film, they overlap with the names erased by history, leaving the audience with a heavy resonance. Since its release on the 15th, the film has drawn more than 130,000 viewers and continues its box office run.
