History Guides the Future in South Korea's Latest Blockbuster

Three uniformed South Korean high school students mercilessly heckle a South Asian migrant laborer in contemporary Busan. Seeing this, an elderly Korean man flies into a rage against them. The privileged youngsters are oblivious to the fact that the old man, Deok-soo, had himself been a migrant laborer. In fact, tens of thousands of South Koreans went to West Germany in the 1960s as Gastarbeiter, or “guest workers”, working as coal miners and nurses. Deok-soo nearly died in a mine collapse in W