General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

To the Starry Island (그 섬에 가고 싶다)

To the Starry Island (그 섬에 가고 싶다) is a 1993 South Korean drama-war film directed by Park Kwang-su, in which a son's attempt to bury his father on his native island collides with the islanders' unresolved hatred from the Korean War. It stars Ahn Sung-ki, Moon Sung-keun, and Shim Hye-jin, was released in South Korea on December 24, 1993, and runs 101 minutes.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Release	December 24, 1993, South Korea; 101 minutes; drama and war genres¹
Director and writers	Park Kwang-su; screenplay by Lim Chul-woo, Lee Chang-dong, and Park Kwang-su¹
Source	Adapted from a work by Im Chul-woo, who is credited as original writer²
Lead cast	Ahn Sung-ki as the poet Kim Chul; Moon Sung-keun in dual roles as the dead father and his son; Shim Hye-jin as Oknim³^•⁴
Setting	Kwisong Island, in 1993 and in flashback to 1950, the year the Korean War broke out⁵^•⁶
Admissions	147,310 per Cine21; the Koreanfilm.org review records 133,282²^•³
Recognition	Nominated for the Golden Leopard at Locarno; Prix du Public at the 1994 Festival of Three Continents; 4K restoration by the Korean Film Archive in 2020⁷^•⁸

Spoilers

Story

Moon Jae-gu sets out by boat carrying a flower-covered funeral bier, honoring his father Moon Deok-bae's last wish to be buried on Kwisong Island, where he was born. As the boat nears the island, the villagers fiercely refuse to let it land, and even docking is denied. Jae-gu's friend, the poet Kim Chul, lands alone and recalls the island's buried memories of 1950.²^•⁶

In the flashbacks, the motherless boy Kim Chul is raised by the village women. Four women shape his childhood: Nupdo-daek, Jae-gu's mother, who loses her mind when her daughter dies and is abandoned by her husband; Bulteok-nyeo, censured by the village women for her natural allure; Upsoon, who becomes a shaman and lets him meet his dead mother's spirit; and Oknim, the village simpleton, who drove away the old husband the villagers forced on her, played with the children, and nursed the unconscious Chul at her breast.²

One day armed soldiers in People's Army uniforms arrive on the island and begin flushing out "reactionaries", and the islanders, to save their own lives, denounce their neighbors. The islanders learn that the entire episode was orchestrated by Deok-bae, who had been expelled from the village and had brought the soldiers in as revenge, and they live afterward with a great accumulated han, the grief and resentment carried in the chest.² The Melbourne festival synopsis adds that Deok-bae, suspected of having killed his wife, had been banished earlier, and that he returned to the island one day with soldiers, shattering its peace.⁹

Production and Lee Chang-dong's debut

The film is Park Kwang-su's fourth feature.³ Its origin is unusually documented: Park Kwang-su, whom the future director Lee Chang-dong met through the writer Choi In-seok, was eager to be introduced to Im Chul-woo, who wrote the source work. After Im prepared a preliminary adaptation, Park asked Lee to revise it, and Lee eventually also took the role of assistant director. The film is widely described as the work that introduced Lee, later the director of Oasis and Poetry, to filmmaking; the Harvard Film Archive calls the screenplay one of his first screen credits.¹⁰^•¹¹

Production used an ensemble of people who became notable afterward. Executive producer Park Ki-yong later directed the award-winning Camel(s), and the assistant directors included Hur Jin-ho (Christmas in August), Park Heung-shik (I Wish I Had a Wife), Oh Seung-wook (Kilimanjaro), and Jang Moon-il. Produced by Park Kwang-su Films in association with Samsung Nices and the UK's Channel 4, the film was shot in 35mm color by cinematographer Yoo Young-kil.³^•¹²

Moon Sung-keun plays dual roles, the deceased Deok-bae in the flashbacks and his son in the present, with the actors playing the parents of their present-day characters across the two eras.³^•¹¹

Themes and reception

The island stands for a place without conflict, a place "where we all want to go"; Oknim's belief that the dead become stars in the sky gives the film its title image.¹³ Park himself framed it as a parable of national division, saying that even an island like this could not remain immune to the hatreds unleashed by the Korean War and asking when the resulting misery and discord would end.⁹ The Busan festival program note describes the island as a testing ground for the resolution of modern Korean history, and its program note credits the film's open shots of sky, water, and island and its visual connection of past and present.¹²

Scholarship on Korean War cinema treats the film as distinctive. Andrew David Jackson, a scholar of Korean studies, argues in Acta Koreana that To the Starry Island and Spring in My Hometown differ from most Korean War films by placing a far greater burden of blame on the Korean population itself: they identify reprisals initiated and aided by South Korean civilians as a key feature of the conflict, produce more ambiguous readings of the violence, and avoid romanticizing prewar Korea.¹⁴ Time Out's review notes that unlike Park's earlier urban films, this one is set in a rural peasant community and uses the supernatural and lengthy flashbacks to the 1950s war.¹⁵

Contemporaneous reception was strong on the festival circuit: the film was lauded at the 1994 Three Continents Festival in Nantes, where it won the Prix du Public, and it competed at Locarno for the Golden Leopard.¹⁴^•⁸^•⁷ Domestically it received the costume award at the 1994 Grand Bell Awards.¹⁶ The Korean Film Archive restored the film in 4K in 2020 under the director's supervision, and it circulates through the archive's Korean Classic Film channel.⁷

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026