This Is the President

Moon Jae-in ibnida

Courtesy of M Project

VERDICT: Lee Chang-jae's documentary about former South Korean president Moon Jae-in mixes footage of his current incarnation as a gardening retiree with glowing testimonials from his aides, but lacks context for non-domestic audiences.

In 2017, South Korean filmmaker Lee Chang-jae became a household name when his documentary Our President, about the late South Korean leader Roh Moo-hyun, tallied 1.85 million admissions during its theatrical run. A portrait of the popular attorney-turned-politician who killed himself in the face of bribery allegations brought by his hostile successor, Lee’s documentary was one of the most successful non-fiction releases in the history of South Korean cinema, and generated debates aplenty between Roh’s liberal-leaning supporters and his right-wing detractors.

Despite its success at home and its backing by the renowned Jeonju International Film Festival, which provided Lee with both financial support (as one of its Jeonju Cinema Projects) and a high-profile world premiere, the film barely raised a ripple outside South Korea. While local viewers of different political persuasions managed to clock Roh’s significance, filling in the narrative blanks with their on-the-ground political knowledge, and became either emancipated or enraged by Lee’s representation of his subject, international audiences struggled to follow the nuances needed to empathise with the rise and fall of this historical icon.

The same fate is certain to befall This Is the President, Lee’s latest documentary about Roh’s political heir Moon Jae-in, who served as South Korea’s head of state from 2017 to 2022. Ignoring chronology and context in a film with significantly fewer dramatic twists than Our President, the new documentary demands a firm grasp of political developments in South Korea during the last decade. The parade of talking-head interviews – ministers, aides, chauffeurs and even fan club moderators – never lets up, while the parts with Moon himself on screen are so fragmentary that uninitiated viewers will struggle to form them into a coherent whole.

It’s perhaps ironic that Lee has fared worse working with a living ex-president than a deceased one. Moon has never been a media-savvy, charismatic populist; in his director’s notes, Lee often describes the principled Moon as “cold”, an opinion echoed by many of the politician’s past and present associates during interviews. But the onus is also on Lee (who seems to have been granted quite a lot of access to Moon at his post-retirement village home) to establish a rapport with his subject, and to be observant and instinctive enough to tease drama and meaning out of a mundane scenario.

In fact, Moon’s terse exchanges with his aides (who are shown here mostly planting fruit and flowers) sometimes make for good comedy, like his interactions with his much more forthright wife Kim Jung-sook. (It’s Kim, rather than Moon, who confronts the foul-mouthed right-wingers camped outside their home, screaming at the couple through megaphones nearly every day.) Instead, Lee goes for middlebrow melodrama. During its Jeonju screening, people were audibly sobbing when Lee shows Moon accompanying his terminally ill dog, Maru, on its final walk. Such visceral reactions are mostly absent otherwise – a sign of how the documentary falls short of making audiences feel for its subject.

Nor do viewers get to understand more about Moon. At the beginning of the film, Moon tells his new neighbours in the village about his “relief” on leaving office and becoming “a free man”, and he describes himself as a “lazy person”. But he is also shown working on his garden from dusk to dawn. His underlings, meanwhile, offer non-stop anecdotes about their erstwhile boss’s zealous dedication to his work and the satisfaction he seems to derive from it. What is this discrepancy between Moon’s self-image and his real personality? This is, after all, the man who worked tirelessly to bring about a historical (albeit merely symbolic) meeting between Donald Trump and Kim Jung-un. And why would Moon really decide to leave everything, in a world where ex-presidents inevitably resurface as political grandees or UN envoys, or make a killing on the lucrative dinner-speaking circuit, or mingle with like-minded celebrities? These questions are left unanswered.

A self-avowed political neutral, Lee is equally ambivalent in deciding which way his documentary should go. As it stands, it’s neither about Moon’s peaceful present with his past activities as a backdrop, nor a celebration of Moon’s incredible political career through the prism of his humble existence as a plant- and pet-loving retiree. The fact that This Is The President ends like a campaign video, with its collage of Moon’s stirring inaugural presidential speech and his major political achievements for his nation, confuses things further: Moon hardly seems the kind to crave hagiography, and his political ambitions appear non-existent today. Lee’s documentary offers a way of looking at one of the most popular presidents in the history of South Korea – but it’s hardly a take which does justice to Moon, neither for knowing Korean audiences nor for less plugged-in audiences abroad.

Director: Lee Chang-jae
Producer: Kim Sung-woo
Cinematographers: Yoon Jong-ho, Kim Min-jeong, Lee Chang-jae, Choi Hyuk-jin
Editors: Kim Hyung-nam, Lee Chang-jae
Music composer: Cho Sung-woo
Production companies: Dice Film
Venue: Jeonju International Film Festival (Jeonju Cinema Project)
In Korean
115 minutes