On April 3, 1948, Jeju Island became the site of a coordinated armed uprising as communist guerrillas launched pre-planned attacks on police stations, officials, and civilians. In the early hours, hundreds of insurgents struck multiple targets, killing officers, destroying homes, and using fear to deter participation in the May 10 elections that would lead to the establishment of the Republic of Korea (Hudson Institute, n.d.). This set in motion the Jeju 4.3 Incident, which quickly escalated into a prolonged period of violence.
The uprising was the result of organised efforts by the Korean Workers’ Party-South, which had developed a structured guerrilla network to disrupt the formation of a separate South Korean state. What followed were years of insurgency and counterinsurgency, during which civilians were heavily affected (Hudson Institute, n.d.). Estimates suggest that around 30,000 people, many of them non-combatants, including women, children, and the elderly, lost their lives, largely during government suppression efforts.
For decades, the incident remained largely silenced. Successive South Korean governments framed it strictly as a communist rebellion, using this narrative to justify both the violence and the suppression of public discussion. Strict anti-communist laws, alongside systems such as guilt-by-association, meant that families of victims faced discrimination, surveillance, and limited opportunities, discouraging them from speaking out. Acknowledging the scale of civilian deaths and the role of state forces risked undermining government legitimacy. As a result, the Jeju 4.3 Incident was excluded from public discourse until political conditions began to shift in the 1980s.
Set against this historical backdrop, My Name tells its story with powerful emotion.
The film is set in 1998 on Jeju Island, where two connected lives slowly begin to reveal something far greater than themselves. Young-oak (excellent performance from Shin Woo-bin), an 18-year-old high school student, moves through a school environment shaped by rigid hierarchies and violence. His discomfort is not only social but personal – starting with his own name, which he thinks does not fit the harsh masculinity expected of him. When a wealthy transfer student, Kyung-tae (another superb performance from Park Ji-bin), arrives and begins to manipulate the fragile balance of the classroom, everyday school life gradually slips into intimidation, control, and escalating conflict, exposing how quickly order can turn into aggression when power goes unchecked.
At home, a different kind of fracture appears. Young-oak’s mother Jeong-sun (very powerful performance from Yeom Hye-ran), a ballet teacher, lives with unexplained anxiety, physical collapse, and an uneasy relationship with light and wind itself. What initially appears as personal illness slowly becomes something more unsettling as fragments of a forgotten childhood begin to surface during her sessions with a psychiatrist.
Chung Ji-young structures the film across these parallel worlds, allowing them to reflect and gradually converge. The school storyline, with its shifting dynamics of dominance and submission, becomes more than a coming-of-age narrative. It reflects systems of control that operate quietly but persistently, where authority is often absent or complicit, and where violence spreads not through chaos alone but through indifference. Even those who resist it find themselves drawn into its logic, unable to fully escape its pull. Alongside this, Jeong-sun’s internal struggle forms the emotional centre of the film. Her inability to access her past is not treated as a mystery to be solved quickly, but as a slow, painful return to something long suppressed. As her memories begin to surface, the film carefully goes back into the past, revealing that her trauma is tied to the broader violence of the April 3 Incident on Jeju Island. It is a history that remains emotionally and politically sensitive, and the film approaches it through fragments.
What gives My Name its depth is how the school life and the past reflect each other. Exclusion, fear, and silence repeat across generations, showing that history does not stay in the past but continues to affect the present. Young-oak’s struggles and Jeong-sun’s memories are both driven by the same forces of control and loss.
As the film moves between present-day life and recovered memory, its emotional impact grows steadily. Chung Ji-young builds meaning slowly through implication and partial understanding. The editing lets the past appear as experience, making memory feel fragile and painful. By the time the connection between mother, son, and history becomes visible, My Name is less about answers and more about facing what has been carried through time. The film suggests the past is never really gone; it just waits to resurface.
What becomes increasingly difficult to ignore is the scale of the history behind it. While 30,000 deaths are often cited, there is a strong possibility that the real number lies somewhere between 60,000 and 80,000. The thought of such a loss – of entire communities, of women and children caught in violence they had no control over – is almost impossible to comprehend. And yet, this remains one of those events in Korean history that is still rarely spoken about, particularly among younger generations.
My Name does something important in that regard; it opens a door. It also encourages reflection, and more than that, it compels you to seek out the truth beyond the screen. The more you read about April 3, the more unsettling the realisation becomes: that politics, in its most extreme forms, can turn into a force that harms the very people it claims to represent. It is a deeply uncomfortable thought, and one the film does not attempt to soften. There is no easy way to process what happened, and perhaps there shouldn’t be. The idea that people of the same country could carry out such violence against one another, that entire villages could be destroyed in the name of ideology, is something that resists understanding.
Through its powerful storytelling and performances, My Name becomes an act of remembrance. And it reminds us that history, however uncomfortable, cannot be ignored forever.
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Written by Maggie Gogler
Featured image courtesy of the Far East Film Festival
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