“Holiday” Poster
Onscreen text during the final moments of Holiday states “This film is for the victims of the Preventative Custody Policy”. A policy which was only abolished in September 2005, just 4 months before Holiday hit the cinema in January 2006, it was used to unfairly extend prison sentences under the guise that it would prevent the prisoner in question from going back to a life of crime. In reality it was mainly used on prisoners who were already on the bottom rungs of society, and whose crimes may not have been any more than petty theft. Tensions came to the fore during the 1988 Seoul Olympics, when it was enforced to keep the less advantaged behind bars for longer (the idea being it was best to keep them out of sight from the global visitors), while more well-connected prisoners who’d done far worse walked free with shorter sentences.
Holiday tells the true story of a group of prisoners who, in October 1988, escaped while being transferred between prisons, enraged at the fact they were going to continue to be behind bars simply for being poor. It was a wise move by director Yang Yoon-ho, as nothing gets Koreans into the cinema like the story of the everyman suffering at the hands of the rich elite, and as a filmmaker he was coming off a post-2000 hot streak of helming 2000’s Libera Me and 2004’s Fighter in the Wind. It was perhaps his previous production which gave him a taste for adapting from real life events, with Fighter in the Wind chronicling the life of Kyokushin karate founder Continue reading
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