Korean sex worker Yonhee goes to Japan to build solidarity with her counterparts there. Yamashita Youngae gives a lecture on how former prostitute-turned-comfort women were left out of the movement to achieve justice for comfort women. Shuttling between the issue of sex workers who refuse to be pictured as victims and the issue of comfort women who couldn’t even be acknowledged as victims, the film reveals stories that had disappeared from official memory.

I have always been somewhat uncomfortable about the fact that the tension between Korea and Japan, or between the conservatives and progressives within Korea, on the subject of whether the comfort women were in fact prostitutes or not.
The source of my discomfort was based on the fact that the tension always reminded me of how the prostitution was preemptively labeled as something `inappropriate´ as well as our society`s deeply rooted `Stamp of Scarlett Letter´ on the prostitutes, of both the Japanese colonial days and present days, with zero consideration of the basic human rights of those in the prostitution.
Surely, what we consider right does not always coincide with truth. Yet the agonising conflict always seems to force our memories and history into confusion.
Red Maria 2 is a story about prostitutes who have all been disregarded by the memories of the human flesh and politics as well as an orbit of history in which women were all together forgotten from our memories.
In the meantime, the plain reality of pain we are to face when confronted with certain truth is still a grave anger on our feet…

2015 제7회 DMZ국제다큐멘터리 영화제 국제경쟁 초청