Synopsis
Every Wednesday at noon, a handful of former “comfort women” and their supporters gather outside the Japanese embassy to participate in the weekly “Wednesday demonstrations”. They demand an official apology and legal reparation from the Japanese government to those women from Korea who were forced into slavery by the Japanese military during the Second World War. Breaking the long silence and leaving behind the years spent living in shame, these elderly women now tell their stories one by one.

Program Note
The very first event that happened in film history creates a moment of realization that something obvious is actually not obvious
 at all. Since the Lumieres invented a new kind of art with the film The Arrival of a Train at La Clotat Station in 1895, documentary
 has been the heart of film as a medium proceeding with ‘record’ and ‘memory.’ However, that heart has never been pounded in the
 Korean film history until The Murmuring was out.

 BYUN Young-joo, the director, meets people to record a scene of history, explains the meaning of the meeting to people, and
 manifests the meaning through the film, which became a crucial part of history. She is the very first documentary producer and
 director of Korea who made all these possible.

 In the time when documentary screening at a theater was unfamiliar, she recruited members of the ‘100 Feet’ to finance her film
 and visited old women who previously rejected to share their experiences to gain their trust. They eventually revealed their voices
 to the world in the screen and this became a historical event.

 Former comfort women, who had considered their past as ‘disgraceful’, lived in ‘silence.’ But BYUN encouraged them to overcome
 the past, fight against the violence Japanese Imperialism committed, and ask for an apology and compensation at the ‘Wednesday
 Demonstration.’ Portraying their current life in the ‘House of Sharing’, this train called The Murmuring arrived in the Korean film
 history too late. Beginning with the scene of the 100th Wednesday Demonstration held in the middle of the winter when you couldn’t even
 open your frozen mouth, The Murmuring is both the late arrival of the voice suppressed by Japanese imperialism and the beginning
 of a long history which had lasted 7 years. [LEE Angela]