Video & Multimedia
Related: About this forumField of Vision - In the Absence
Nominated by the Academy Awards for Best Documentary, In the Absence uses recordings during the sinking by the Coast Guard, news footage and interviews with parents and the civilian divers. The level of incompetence is staggering. It is extremely depressing and enraging.
I was in Korea when this happened. It is difficult to describe how people felt, because feelings were all over the map, largely due to the incompetence, indifference, corruption that had happened. It was almost as if what we were watching and hearing put everyone on overload trying to digest and understand. Example: Civilian divers had to try and recover the bodies, because the coast guard had no one trained to dive down to where the ship was. The dash cam footage you see of the vehicles, that was due to a change in the law from the Lee Myeong-bak (Conservative of course) administration that changed the way cargo had to be secured.
Aeon link and description from Aeon
https://aeon.co/videos/they-told-us-to-stay-put-the-south-korean-ferry-disaster-that-sank-lives-and-trust
They told us to stay put: the South Korean ferry disaster that sank lives and trust
On 16 April 2014, the ferry MV Sewol sunk off the coast of South Korea, killing 304 people the vast majority of them high-school students on a field trip. Like many other tragedies, the event made headlines around the world before quickly fading from the international news cycle. In South Korea, however, facts about the incompetence, government failures and lapses in responsibility that led to the Sewols sinking emerged slowly over the course of several years, prolonging pain and stoking anger to the present day. The documentary In the Absence by the South Korean director Yi Seung-Jun is a devastating account of the sinking and its aftermath from the first signs of trouble at sea to the years-long struggle by bereaved families demanding accountability and justice. Combining original material with real-time audio and video of the tragedy, the film offers an extraordinary, chilling account of the consequences of following instructions from inept authorities and the profound breakdown of public trust that follows such a disaster.
If you're feeling the need to be sad and get a full feeling for the pain, the school put together a commemorative video for everyone who died, it had all the students, the teachers, the sailors and the cafeteria worker aboard who died. The cafeteria worker waved several lives before drowning -- unlike the captain, she stayed and helped.
The singer is merely singing the names of all the dead, along with their classrooms, their desks, and some pictures of them
angstlessk
(11,862 posts)To allow that ferry to stay down in the depths with all those people on board was shameful...and to think I thought Park was a victim?
rpannier
(24,329 posts)They really thought they were going to be okay.
In one video most of the girls are filming each other and they laugh when one girl cries wanting her mother because the other girls were certain the helicopter would save them. (This was as the ship was tilted on one side)
Another video from the boys cabin, the certainty became not sure and when they were certain it might not end well, some scrambled for their phones to call family.
I guess at one point (about 40 mins into the ship sinking) a U.S. Naval ship came upon the scene and the Korean Coast Guard told them they were unneeded
It was such a mess