Giltaek’s Children

This is a story about a collection of poetic works written by children attending school in a tiny and depressed mining town in South Korea in the tumultuous and chaotic period of the early 1980s. The programme traces the lives of the student poets and later encounters many of them as adults. Their writing as children reveals their thoughts, their love-hate relationships with their fathers, and their perspectives on growing up in an impoverished environment. As presentday adults they are re-introduced to their writing and consequently to their lives and the times they spent writing as children. Their pasts mirror the state of Korean society and in particular the lives of miners, the vocation most of them have entered into, in a neglected part of the country.