Hwang Dong-hyuk’s 2011 film Silenced (Dogani) arrived on Netflix on November 4, fifteen years after it drew 4.66 million admissions in South Korean theaters and helped change the country’s law on sex crimes against children and disabled people. The film, which stars Gong Yoo and Jung Yu-mi, is now streaming on the platform alongside a November lineup of Korean titles that includes Miss Granny and Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love.
Released on September 22, 2011 with a 19-and-over rating, Silenced opened at No. 1 at the Korean box office on its first day and passed one million admissions within five days, TV Report reported. It held the top spot for three consecutive weeks and finished its run with about 4.66 million admissions, a figure also cited by the Korean Film Council’s 2011 box office data. FandomWire, in a retrospective on the film, noted the same admissions total and called it Hwang’s darkest movie, a striking label for the director who would later create Squid Game.
Gong Yoo plays Kang In-ho, an art teacher who takes a post at a school for hearing-impaired children in the fictional city of Mujin and discovers that the principal and teachers have been abusing students for years. Jung Yu-mi plays Seo Yu-jin, a worker at a human rights center who joins him in trying to expose the truth. The film is adapted from Gong Ji-young’s 2009 novel The Crucible.
The story is based on real events at Gwangju Inhwa School, a school for hearing-impaired children, where staff abused students between 2000 and 2005. The abuse came to light in June 2005 after a staff member reported it, and six people were named as perpetrators. In the first trial in January 2008, the principal was sentenced to five years in prison, but on appeal that July the sentence was cut to two and a half years, suspended for three years. At the time, sex crimes could only be punished if the victim filed a complaint, and settlements and withdrawn complaints were reflected in the sentences. Some perpetrators escaped punishment altogether because the complaint period had expired, and some returned to the school afterward, while teachers who had sided with the students were disciplined.
The film reignited public anger that had faded. As viewers demanded a reinvestigation and the school’s closure, police formed a 15-member special investigation team in September 2011. The school’s administrative chief, who had originally received a 10-month sentence suspended for two years, was sentenced to eight years in prison in 2013 after the reinvestigation. In October 2011, the National Assembly passed a revision to the special act on sex crimes, the so-called Dogani Law, abolishing the statute of limitations for sex crimes against disabled people and children under 13 and imposing heavier penalties on staff at facilities for the disabled. The bill passed with 207 votes in favor and one abstention. Gwangju City shut the school down in November 2011.
Korean viewers quoted in TV Report’s coverage remembered the film as one of the most shocking they had ever seen. One wrote that films like this need to be made so that society changes, even a little, while another said the fact that it was based on a true story made it hit harder. TV Report noted that the film, which once shook society and changed the law, now meets a new generation of viewers through Netflix and poses its questions all over again.
For Hwang, Silenced was the film that made his name. He had debuted with My Father in 2007, and after Silenced went on to direct Miss Granny and The Fortress before creating Squid Game for Netflix, becoming the first Korean to win the Emmy for drama directing. Fifteen years on, the director’s bleakest work and his global hit sit side by side on the same platform.
Silenced arrived on Netflix on the same day as Miss Granny, the 2014 comedy in which Na Moon-hee’s 70-something Oh Mal-soon returns to her 20-year-old self, played by Sim Eun-kyung. That film drew 8.6 million admissions in theaters. Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love, his first film in eight years since Burning and, according to TV Report, the first Korean film to win the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice International Film Festival, reaches Netflix on November 6 after opening in theaters on September 23. The Devil’s Plan: Dead Again, a 14-episode brain-survival series featuring Jang Dong-min and Hong Jin-ho, rolls out over three weeks from November 10, while the Korea-Japan joint series Blue Road, directed by D.P.’s Han Jun-hee and starring Son Suk-ku and Nagayama Eita, arrives on November 20. Hollywood titles Inception and Interstellar joined the lineup on November 5.
Silenced is streaming on Netflix now.
