Father's Liberation Diary

History and its contradictions, seen through an unconverted long-term prisoner

“Again this year I cross to Piagol in Jirisan to meet you, and the moonlight is as dim as it was then.”

Father’s Liberation Diary traces, from the vantage of the 1990s, the painful life of an “unconverted” long-term political prisoner. Kim Hyung-seop, now a white-haired man in his eighties, was arrested three days after being sent South as a spy and spent thirty years in prison. The play opens and closes with a humble memorial rite he holds in his cell for comrades who shared it with him.

His past is revealed through visits from his middle-aged daughter Sun-ok. Raised hating communists, she seeks out the father she believed dead only because of her mother’s dying wish. From Song Jae-cheon, an old friend of her father recently released, she learns his story: an ordinary farmer chosen by neighbours to head the local security unit, he became a partisan in Jirisan, went North, was sent South and imprisoned. Having watched countless comrades die, he refuses to the end the forced “conversion” pressed on him even through violence.

Interweaving the father’s and daughter’s past and present, the play makes the father a living witness to history and shows how the daughter comes to see the sharp contradictions of her society with new questions.