pls pls come sooner im sick of watching heesu's actor die in thriller dramas that i watch. i BADLY need to see…
HAHAHAHH I feel this comment so much!! If you haven’t watched it already I totally recommend the film A Boy and Sungreen; Ahn Ji Ho and Kim Joo Ah (also in All of Us Are Dead) play normal high schoolers in a super wholesome, found family coming of age-ish movie with a little bit of LGBTQ+ representation :)) Might not be what you’re looking for but if you can find it it’s definitely a lighter work in his filmography!!
In some sources, this film (also called “Swallow” although swallows and sparrows are two different birds), is described as involving a character that is a 프락치, or a “Frakchi” in English. I was curious about what this term meant so I did some research. Also it seems like no English-speaking countries seem to care about this topic so please take everything with a grain of salt because I used Google’s auto translate 👀
Here is a summary of what I researched, links are at the end:
So basically “Frakchi” (originally Russian, фракция) is a term that means a political party, and means spy. It was originally used after the Russian Revolution and at the tail end of Tsarist rule in Russia in the 19th and 20th centuries, when police informants infiltrated the movements of the discontent working class to collect information and direct the masses in the way the ruling class wanted. In Korea, it means someone who hides their identity for a certain purpose and enters into another group to spy on them. It began being used in Korea in the 1949 National Assembly Frakchi Incident where some members of the South Korean Workers’ Party were involved in frakchi activities. So that’s the origin of the term “frakchi”. As far as what this movie seems to be about, frakchis were very prevalent in the 1980s during the student pro-democracy movements. Basically, the police would recruit people with a criminal record/unemployed people/homeless people, and not imprison lawbreakers and instead give them a job infiltrating colleges as “fake college students” to give information about student revolutionary movements. The police at first recruited these informants and sent them to spy on schools they did not qualify for, but when the schools became suspicious they aimed to recruit actual students of a college or graduates of a college. The military government would also coerce student activists to betray their peers by torturing and humiliating them. The tortured activists would be forced to confess the secrets of the student movements and the government would turn the captured activists into frakchis to spy on their own organizations, saying things like “If you catch __ (activist), well release you.” In these times, some student organizations were very tense about infiltration and sometimes take overly violent measures against exposed frakchis or people they assumed were frakchis, leading to a lot of beating and torture. Anyways I tried to summarize some main points, but there is so much information about this topic that I haven’t gotten the chance to dive into. I highly recommend doing research on this topic, even if you don’t understand Korean, because it is a really interesting historical movement with a lot of depth. I definitely did not need to get so obsessed with a film that does not even exist yet, but I love the concept and am really interested in this period of Korean history, as well as any revolutionary event (I also really like the actors, but that’s besides the point). Thanks so much if you’ve read till the end (I know it’s very wordy) and I hope you find this info useful! Happy content-consuming and have a nice day :)
Sources:
Not directly related but there is a film from 2004 called “Frakchi” or “Spying Cam” about these fake college students in the 1980s (https://kisskh.at/27482-spying-cam).
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Here is a summary of what I researched, links are at the end:
So basically “Frakchi” (originally Russian, фракция) is a term that means a political party, and means spy. It was originally used after the Russian Revolution and at the tail end of Tsarist rule in Russia in the 19th and 20th centuries, when police informants infiltrated the movements of the discontent working class to collect information and direct the masses in the way the ruling class wanted. In Korea, it means someone who hides their identity for a certain purpose and enters into another group to spy on them. It began being used in Korea in the 1949 National Assembly Frakchi Incident where some members of the South Korean Workers’ Party were involved in frakchi activities.
So that’s the origin of the term “frakchi”. As far as what this movie seems to be about, frakchis were very prevalent in the 1980s during the student pro-democracy movements. Basically, the police would recruit people with a criminal record/unemployed people/homeless people, and not imprison lawbreakers and instead give them a job infiltrating colleges as “fake college students” to give information about student revolutionary movements. The police at first recruited these informants and sent them to spy on schools they did not qualify for, but when the schools became suspicious they aimed to recruit actual students of a college or graduates of a college. The military government would also coerce student activists to betray their peers by torturing and humiliating them. The tortured activists would be forced to confess the secrets of the student movements and the government would turn the captured activists into frakchis to spy on their own organizations, saying things like “If you catch __ (activist), well release you.” In these times, some student organizations were very tense about infiltration and sometimes take overly violent measures against exposed frakchis or people they assumed were frakchis, leading to a lot of beating and torture.
Anyways I tried to summarize some main points, but there is so much information about this topic that I haven’t gotten the chance to dive into. I highly recommend doing research on this topic, even if you don’t understand Korean, because it is a really interesting historical movement with a lot of depth. I definitely did not need to get so obsessed with a film that does not even exist yet, but I love the concept and am really interested in this period of Korean history, as well as any revolutionary event (I also really like the actors, but that’s besides the point). Thanks so much if you’ve read till the end (I know it’s very wordy) and I hope you find this info useful! Happy content-consuming and have a nice day :)
Sources:
Not directly related but there is a film from 2004 called “Frakchi” or “Spying Cam” about these fake college students in the 1980s (https://kisskh.at/27482-spying-cam).
History and definition:
https://ko.wikipedia.org/wiki/프락치
History and definition:
https://namu.wiki/w/프락치
Article about Frakchis in 1980s:
https://www.hani.co.kr/arti/politics/politics_general/757549.html