General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

The President's Last Bang (그때 그사람들)

The President's Last Bang (그때 그사람들) is a 2005 South Korean black comedy film directed by Im Sang-soo that dramatizes the October 26, 1979 assassination of President Park Chung-hee by Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) director Kim Jae-gyu at a dinner party in Seoul¹^•². It stars Han Suk-kyu, Baek Yoon-sik, and Song Jae-ho, and was released in South Korea on February 3, 2005 by MK Pictures¹. The film became the center of a landmark Korean dispute over free expression and the depiction of historical figures when Park's son Park Ji-man sought to block its release³.

Key fact	Detail
Korean title / director	그때 그사람들, directed by Im Sang-soo; screenplay by Jang Jun-seok and Im Sang-soo¹
Subject	The 10·26 incident, the assassination of President Park Chung-hee on October 26, 1979, told as a tragicomedy of the KCIA officials involved²
Release	February 3, 2005, South Korea; 101–102 minutes; rated 15+; produced and distributed by MK Pictures¹^•⁴
Cast	Han Suk-kyu (KCIA agent Ju), Baek Yoon-sik (KCIA director Kim), Song Jae-ho (President Park), Kim Eung-soo, Jeong Won-joong¹
Legal outcome	January 31, 2005 injunction ordered three documentary scenes removed; 2008 settlement added a fiction disclaimer and returned a 100 million won damages award⁵^•³
Festival and box office	Directors' Fortnight at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival; 890,540 admissions and $4,249,074 gross per KOFIC records⁶^•⁴

Spoilers

Plot and approach

The film covers a single day. KCIA director Kim, told of a dinner party at a safe house in Gungjeong-dong, goes there with his aide Colonel Min. During the banquet he clashes with the presidential chief bodyguard Cha, whose overbearing manner he resents, and he reveals an assassination plan to Min and agent Ju, who arms four subordinates who do not know what they are being prepared for⁷. The Busan festival program describes the film as redramatizing the assassination of President Park on October 26, 1979, and notes that Im does not pursue historical causality or a political thesis but instead makes a cynical, fatalist tragicomedy of the characters' situation².

The production company framed the film the same way. Its press release stated that the story focuses not on the men at the center of power but on Han Suk-kyu's KCIA section chief and his subordinates, people caught under the surface of the historical event, portraying "the irony of our era and a self-portrait of ourselves" as black comedy⁸.

Production and title

Filming began on September 10, 2004, and the producers kept the project secret until December 21, 2004, anticipating that a comedy treatment of the 10·26 incident would be politically interpreted and could provoke unnecessary misunderstanding before the film could be judged on its own terms⁸. Producer Shim Jae-myung later recalled that the team was careful: the film neither took Kim Jae-gyu's side nor attacked Park Chung-hee, but they worried it would be received as irreverent in a period when such material was hard to accept⁹.

The title echoes "Geuttae Geusaram" ("Those People of That Time"), the signature song of singer Sim Soo-bong, who performed at the banquet and witnessed the assassination. After the song became linked in public memory with the 10·26 incident and Park Chung-hee, the 2005 film's title drew on that association¹⁰.

The injunction and lawsuits

When the comedy treatment became known, Park Chung-hee's son Park Ji-man applied to the Seoul Central District Court on January 10, 2005 for an injunction banning screening on the ground that scenes defamed the late president¹¹. On January 31, 2005 the court issued a partial injunction: the film could not be shown or distributed with its documentary footage intact. The three ordered cuts were all clearly distinguishable from the fiction: the opening 1979 Busan protest footage with narration, Cardinal Kim Sou-hwan's funeral prayer for Park, and the closing funeral footage including Park Geun-hye in silent mourning. The court reasoned that such record footage risked giving audiences the impression that the film reproduced real events⁵.

The court refused, however, to ban the rest of the film. It acknowledged that some scenes distorted impressions of the late president, but held that banning a screening required more than a subjective injury to feelings of honor; objective damage to social evaluation had to be shown. It also noted that the film presented itself as fiction-based black comedy and that Park, as a public figure, had to tolerate some intrusion¹². Scenes the plaintiff had challenged, including the president's crude talk in a helicopter, his reveries at the banquet, and his last words after being shot, were allowed to remain⁵.

Park Ji-man then filed a full damages suit. The first-instance court declined to ban screening but ordered MK Pictures to pay him 100 million won, finding that the film's portrayal infringed the family's feelings of reverence and mourning for the deceased³. In 2008 the parties accepted a court-mediated settlement: MK Pictures added a caption stating that the film is based on imagination using a historical event as its motif, that most details and the characters' psychological portrayals are fiction, and Park Ji-man returned the 100 million won³. The removed documentary scenes were replaced with black screens in some prints, and the DVD carries a notice that the scenes were deleted by court decision¹³.

The case became a reference point for later disputes. The Supreme Court's framework for defamation in works about historical figures, weighing the content asserted, the credibility of the sources behind the creator's belief, the work's purpose, whether the figure is central or background, and the degree of fictionalization, with audience confusion between fiction and fact as a key element, is discussed in commentary on later films with reference to the precedent set by this case³. When the film 29 Years was announced in 2008, Yonhap News predicted it might repeat the controversy, noting that the injunction had also ignited political debate over how Park Chung-hee should be evaluated¹⁴.

Reception

The film premiered in Directors' Fortnight at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival⁶. Screen Daily's review described it as Im Sang-soo's most ambitious feature to that point and noted that it was released only after the late president's daughter had documentary footage removed on accuracy grounds, while observing that the film does not pretend to be accurate⁶. On Rotten Tomatoes it holds an 82 percent Tomatometer from 34 reviews, with an audience rating of 7.2⁷.

Box office figures differ by source. The Korean Film Council database records 890,540 admissions on 140 screens and a gross of $4,249,074⁴, while Cine21 lists 1,083,962 admissions¹⁵. An academic account states the film was seen by a million viewers, with the controversy over its sharp irony toward Park Chung-hee and his cronies helping the box office¹⁶. It did not reach the top ten highest-grossing Korean films of 2005, but the censorship case, covered widely in news stories and reviews, added to Im Sang-soo's reputation as one of the maverick filmmakers of the new Korean cinema¹⁷.

Legacy

The film is regularly cited alongside Im's later historical works such as The Old Garden (2007) and The Housemaid (2010) as examples of a director willing to speak about history boldly, and for engaging political figures like Park Chung-hee directly¹⁸. When the 2020 film The Man Standing Next returned to the same assassination, a Kyunghyang commentary contrasted the two: The President's Last Bang was a sly black comedy mocking the powerful, while the later film was a serious spy drama made in a period when judgment on Park and his legacy had been settled, and Baek Yoon-sik's Kim Jae-gyu and Song Jae-ho's Park were recast by Yoon Yeo-jung's Sim Soo-bong and Lee Byung-hun's Kim Jae-gyu in the later film⁹.

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026