Synopsis
The documentaryTwo Doors traces the Yongsan Tragedy of 2009, which took the lives of five evictees and one police SWAT unit member. Left with no choice but to climb up a steel watchtower in an appeal to the right to live, the evictees were able to come down to the ground a mere 25 hours after they had started to build the watchtower, as cold corpses. And the surviving evictees became lawbreakers. The announcement of the Public Prosecutors’ Office that the cause of the tragedy lay in the illegal and violent demonstration by the evictees, who had climbed up the watchtower with fire bombs, clashed with voices of criticism that an excessive crackdown by government power had turned a crackdown operation into a tragedy.

Program Note
On January 20, 2009, five evictees and one police officer were killed. The evictees who climbed up to the top of the Namildang building in Yongsan, pleading for their right to live there, came down from the building as cold corpses, and the ones who lived became criminals. Two Doors , a film about the Yongsan disaster, attracted more than 70,000 viewers and became a social phenomenon. Videos shot by internet broadcasts and by national TV stations, video clips collected by the police as evidence, and audio recordings of the trial processes are the primary records that make up Two Doors . In addition to the materials, interviews of the five central figures, newspaper articles, and reenactments are added. Editing techniques and music befitting a thriller are utilized. Placing the records at the forefront of the film is far from providing the audience with raw and pure facts. Rather, these records are materials for the restructuring of the event, achieved using newspaper articles and interviews of the evictees’ defense council. When the event is reenacted, loopholes and contradictions in the assertions made by the governmental authority and in the court’s decision are revealed. Even though all parties are involved in violence, they are all victims of violence at the same time. Also, the root of violence hidden behind the legal battle is exposed. The film shows a way to approach the truth, or to deconstruct the argument put forth by the media and create a new discourse on the new media-landscape consisting of personal media, social network services, internet broadcasts, and digital knowledge databases. [Hwang Miyojo]