Dr. David W. Plath, Emeritus, Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign new documentary film So Long Asleep; waking the ghosts of a war has been selected for screening in October during the annual Margaret Mead Film Festival in New York’s American Museum of Natural History.

So Long Asleep (60 minutes) follows an international team of East Asian volunteers as they excavate, preserve and repatriate the remains of Korean men who died doing slave labor in Hokkaido during the Asia-Pacific War. On the 70th anniversary of the end of the war we travel with them as they carry 115 sets of remains on a pilgrimage across Japan and over to Korea for reinternment in the Seoul Municipal Cemetery. Using a dark past to shape a brighter shared future the project offers an upbeat model for remembrance and reconciliation that could be adapted widely.

Documentary Educational Resources (der.org) will have copies of the film ready for distribution later this summer. Please visit the DER website to view a trailer. Dialogue is in English, Korean and Japanese; in the DER edition the dialogue carries English subtitles. Separately, project participants have prepared editions with subtitles in Korean and in Japanese. For the Korean version, contact Professor Byung-Ho Chung (bhc0606@gmail.com) and for Japanese contact Professor Song Ki-Chan (kichans@hotmail.com)