Not the entire book – We Do Not Part, a new masterpiece by the winner of the 2024 Nobel prize in literature Han Kang – but rather shards of reality and dream, of historic trauma and poetry. The events focus on the consequences of the 1948 uprising on the island of Jeju, in South Korea, where thirty thousand civilians were killed, their bodies dragged into the sea, hidden in a mine or crammed into trenches under the airport runway. For years, severe punishment was dealt out to anyone looking for the remains of their dead.
It is an open wound that continues to torment two friends, just as it did the mother of one of them, who had directly witnessed this crime. Women determined not to forget, drawing on the painful power of love. A form of affective resistance, like that studied by the anthropologist Chowra Makaremi, according to whom affection, having overcome its powerlessness, generates living memory and becomes a source of support, contrasting policies of cruelty.
In Che dolore terribile è l’amore, the stage is the scene for an encounter between one of the characters from the novel (In-seon), who looks back over the Jeju massacre from the point of view of film-maker, woman and – above all – daughter, and another film-maker, a woman and – above all – daughter, whose past is marked by a European historical drama. These two women share the same mother, a woman of few words who bears the visible marks of the past.

Show in Italian with English and Italian surtitles

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