Educational Media Reviews Online

In Tiger Spirit, Canadian-Korean filmmaker Min Sook Lee focuses on the sorrows and hardships of families permanently separated by the hard-line political division of Korea into North and South after the Korean War. The emotional core of the film is the coverage of the brief, highly orchestrated reunion allowed to selected families by North and South Korean governments in 2007. (A similar reunion was permitted again in 2009). The sadness, regret and sense of loss of families artificially separated by 50 years of intra-national political hostility are truly heartbreaking. While Lee offers engaging insights into a topic which has not been widely covered by other documentary films, one wishes her focus and her editorial hand had been a bit more rigorous and steady. There’s simply too much territory being covered in the film. Ms Lee’s personal quest for answers about her ethnic and national roots and identity, and her discussions of her own young family aren’t particularly well developed, and ultimately don’t contribute much to the central focus of her film. The tiger in the title refers to a search for the elusive (and perhaps apocryphal) last remaining tigers in Korea that Lee tags along with. The tiger is both an important religious and cultural symbol in Korea, and Lee attempts to use the beast and the hunt for it as a kind of metaphor for a divided Korea and for her own personal quests for identity. It doesn’t work particularly well. Although the tiger hunting sequences are interesting on their own, the use of this rather tenuous narrative conceit to anchor the film slows things down and, in the end, adds little. The film in general could have used the services of a harder-nosed and more dispassionate editor; shots tend to be held longer than necessary, and whole sequences could have used judicious pruning. Overall, while structurally flawed, this is a generally interesting and useful documentary which could profitably be used in Asian or Asian-American Studies class or in courses dealing with world peace and conflict studies.