Jeon tae soo biography sample

  • Jeon Tae-Il was a young left-wing activist in the very anti-communist sixties in Korea.
  • Jeon Tae-il is widely known in South Korea as a labour martyr after his protest self immolation in 1970.
  • Jeon Tae-il really existed.

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    FILMS

    A SINGLE SPARK


    Jeon Tae-il

    South Korea, 1995, 110 min

    Shown in 1996

    CREDITS

    dir
    Park Kwang-su
    prod
    Yoo In-taek
    scr
    Lee Chang-dong, Kim Jung-hwan, Lee Hyo-in
    cam
    Yoo Young-gil
    editor
    Kim Yang-il
    cast
    Moon Sung-keun, Hong Kyoung-in, Kim Sun-jae, Lee Joo-shil

    OTHER

    source
    Fortissimo Film Sales
    premiere
    North American Premiere

    COMMENTS

    Park Kwang-su in person.

    Jeon Tae-il really existed. Barely educated but instinctively studious, he sold cheap umbrellas on the streets of Seoul until he got a job as an assistant pattern cutter in a garment industry sweatshop. He was appalled by the working conditions and began to campaign for implementation of existing laws to protect workers. In the fanatically anticommunist climate of the 1960s, when Korea was under military dictatorship, he made little headway and decided to make the ultimate sacrifice to publicize his cause. Park Kwang-su’s piercing film centers on a wan

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    On 13th November 1970, a young textile worker named Jeon Tae-il protested harsh working conditions by self-immolating and running through the streets shouting, “Obey the Labour Standards Act!”. Though Jeon’s solitary act was not the first protest concerning labour standards in South Korea, it nevertheless has retrospectively become, as Bruce Cummings states, “the touchstone of the labour movement”.[1] While Jeon’s sacrifice brought attention to the various oppressive and exploitative elements inherent in industrial work, leading to his lasting significance as a symbol of resistance for labour rights,[2] his act did little to halt the many abuses suffered by workers during this period. In fact, Cummings highlights Jeon’s act as one of two key reasons[3]  behind the implementation of dictator Park Chung-hee’s Yushin [4] regime in 1972. This decree saw Park not only consolidate his power, removing any term limits on his governance, but also saw a harsher response to protests and s

  • jeon tae soo biography sample

    • •

    E51: Jeon Tae-il and Lee So-sun

    Podcast episode about two extremely influential South Korean worker organisers, Jeon Tae-il and Lee So-sun, and the autonomous self-organisation of women textile and garment workers in the country from the 1960s to the 1980s.

    Jeon Tae-il is widely known in South Korea as a labour martyr after his protest self immolation in 1970. His mother, Lee So-sun is less well known, despite her decades of activism, and even less spoken about are the unnamed masses of textile and garment workers, mostly women and girls, who self organised in sweatshops across the country, despite a brutal military dictatorship.
    We speak with Rachel Min Park, a member of the Heung Coalition, about these events, in the first of an intermittent series of episodes about Korean history.

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