Sewing Sisters brings together the individuals who were involved in the struggle against eviction of the Cheonggye clothing labor union labor school on September 9, 1977. Instead of focusing on the subjects’ involvement, though, the film listens to their private history. It also creates intimacy with the interviewees and the audience through anecdotes, such as how they could not enroll in the labor school, even though they wanted to, due to their timid personalities and how they successfully got jobs by lying that they had work experience.
As such, instead of just treating them as union members, Sewing Sisters approaches them as people who have experienced injustice and hardship since childhood being “sida.” A story that at the most sensible age, it was most unfair to pay an adult fee for a bus ride because they did not have school uniforms, a story about how they could not go to middle school because their fathers said that women should not study, and a story of how they were trapped in a police station detention center and worried about going to work the next day, all make us wonder what it was that they so needed to protect.
Their portraits are inserted here and there in the film, and the film ends with a visit to the Pyeonghwa Market, their former workplace, and with them singing together. [Nandule, HAEPARI]