La Chica Del Sur By José Luis Garcia

La chica del sur (2012) is a paradigmatic case of a documentary that ameliorates territorial and cultural difference through mobility. A distant event deeply impacts the director and serves as the film’s pretext: in 1989, José Luis García took part in the thirteenth annual World Youth Festival in Pyongyang, North Korea, a political event that the Soviet Union sponsored just three weeks before the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing and four weeks before the fall of the Berlin Wall. While García filmed this extraordinary event with a hand-held VHS camera, he unexpectedly encountered a captivating, young, South Korean political activist named Lim Sukyung who had clandestinely infiltrated the event to advocate for the peaceful reunification of
It is as if the director wants to show us how history repeats. José Luis García travels twice to Korea (first to the north and then to the south); we hear the Communist “Internationale” played twice on the soundtrack (first extradiagetically as fanfare in 1989 and then diagetically as an experimental, electronic composition in 2011); Lim Sukyung twice sings a melancholy Korean folk song (first in a Karaoke bar in Seoul and later accompanied by a guitar in Ushuaia); José Luis García twice mentions (using the same words) the number of airplanes a person has to take to get from Argentina to Korea and back again; and Lim Sukyung travels southward twice (to South Korea in 1989 and to southern Argentina in 2011). Repetition, as narrative form, dramatically expresses deep historical fissures, as well as radical changes in political and ideological paradigms; at the same time, it serves to tie historical events to personal conflicts. In this sense, La chica del sur is a symptom of the historical time prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, a time in which totalizing narratives (Marxism, communism, antiimperialism) allowed individuals to explain the world around them. The abundant archival images that fill the first half of the film simply confirm this. We witness massive political rallies, throngs of youth in the streets, colorful choreography, and vibrant chants about the possibility of changing the world. José Luis García’s skill (or luck) is to have witnessed (and recorded audiovisually) such a key moment, just before history took an irrevocable turn. By 2011, South Korea would lose all the color present in these archival images from two decades earlier: the multitudes would be replaced by intimate groups of friends, the political meetings by people having drinks in bars; instead of accessing images of Lim Sukyung on a television screen, García would meet her personally in her home and have dinner with her