Documentary
‘Almost impossible to think about’: the Seoul crowd disaster one year on
A new docuseries revisits the tragedy that killed 159 people and exposed a system that undervalued younger people
David Smith in Washington
@smithinamericaThu 19 Oct 2023 03.16 AEDT
No bomb went off. No bullets were fired. No building fell down, no car veered out of control and no plane fell out of the sky. Yet still 159 mostly young people perished that night, crushed to death by nothing more than their own volume and a banal failure of planning.
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“This wasn’t a concert or mosh pit or soccer game where barriers are erected for a day and maybe they’re in the wrong position,” explains Stu Schreiberg, executive producer of Crush, a two-part documentary about a deadly crowd disaster in Seoul, South Korea, last year. “This is a public street with lots of history of traffic patterns and where the choke points are and so it is almost impossible to think about how 159 died.”
More than 100,000 revellers were packed into the narrow bar-lined alleyways of Seoul’s trendy Itaewon neighbourhood for the first full Halloween celebration since coronavirus pandemic restrictions had been lifted. They became trapped in mass panic. Witnesses described people – many in Halloween costumes – falling on one another like dominoes, suffering severe breathing difficulties and falling unconscious. Most of the dead were in their 20s and 30s, and about two-thirds were women.
It was South Korea’s worst disaster since a 2014 ferry sinking that killed 304 people and exposed lax safety rules and regulatory failures. Yet such is the fast metabolism of the media that the Halloween horror did not linger in global headlines for long. The producers of Crush hope that, by giving viewers the vicarious experience of what happened, the events of that night will be remembered so that lessons can be learned from them.
Dispensing with a narrator, the tragedy is replayed in intimate, immersive and harrowing detail, drawing on 1,500 hours of archival footage from 280 sources, including body-camera video, surveillance video, survivors’ mobile phones, inquiry hearings and press conferences. Like the last calls of airline passengers on 11 September 2001, there are poignant words from people calling emergency services voiced by actors.
Speaking via video call from Los Angeles, Schreiberg adds: “The thing that was shocking to me when we first started looking at the footage coming in was the visual juxtaposition where you have people in obvious distress and then only a few feet away people are taking selfies, not aware.
“It’s almost like split attentions and that’s part of all the sensory input that’s coming into Itaewon. You’ve got music blaring, you’ve got crowds moving in lots of directions. What’s amazing about the footage is how people reacted so differently depending on where they were.”
He adds: “There is the whole notion of relatability. We’ve all been in Times Square. We’ve all walked at 30 Rock at Christmas time. We’ve all been in crowded elevators and so there’s something that is very universal about what actually could happen here.”
The film-makers also shot 22 interviews with people caught inside the tragedy as well as government, medical and other first responders. Among them is an American student who convinced her roommate to go out to a bar for the first time with fatal consequences; a fashion executive who describes his desperate search for his best friend; a Korean illustrator who was buried under dozens of bodies and must now come to terms with being partially paralysed; and two off-duty US soldiers who describe how they pulled unconscious people from the crowd.
Jeff Zimbalist, another executive producer of the film, says from Los Angeles: “Even though these are incredibly tragic incidents and there is no way to see them through a positive lens, there are moments of generosity, heroism where the human spirit comes through and making the stories a little more palatable by including some of these instances was important to us.
“We were ultimately inspired by some of those anecdotes that we were able to find and include where American soldiers helped save probably dozens of lives, where a German expat helped to unite some of the other characters in our American pod. So trying to make sure that we’re not just painting the bleak picture.”
Known for a expat-friendly, cosmopolitan atmosphere, Itaewon was the country’s hottest spot for Halloween events and parties, with young South Koreans taking part in costume competitions at bars, clubs and restaurants.
Josh Gaynor, who co-executive-produced, says from Bologna, Italy: “It’s not just a cool part of town; it’s not just a place where young people go; it represents diversity, it represents freedom, it represents a place where people can go and be themselves, whoever that may be, and interact with people that perhaps they don’t always interact with.”
Zimbalist adds: “It celebrates career paths that aren’t traditionally celebrated in South Korea, like the arts.”
Steven Blesi, Sara Camargo, Arianna Ibarra, Ian Chang and Anne Gieske. Photograph: Sara Camargo/Courtesy of Paramount+Indeed, the tragedy and subsequent investigation exposed a generation gap in the country. The second episode explores claims that police had failed to act on a report that gave plenty of warning about what tragedies could happen, including specific scenarios that came to pass, but were less responsive to the information than they should have been.
Zimbalist continues: “The explanations that we got and that were offered in the series had a lot to do with the politics of using tax money to allocate big amounts of resources and authorities to do crowd control in a district of the city that is generally rather stigmatised as a place of fun and revelry for the youth.”
He adds: “In a culture that values work above play and in an older generation that was a part of the economic boom since the Korean war in 1953, there is an expectation that the younger generation will follow suit.
“The younger generation generally feels that, as hard as they’re being asked to work, they’re still facing unemployment, often poverty and unrealistic expectations of how they can live and survive and be psychologically healthy. It’s a country with one of the highest suicide rates in the world.”
Initial reports on the incident pointed to negligence and lack of preparedness and painted a picture of a government and system of authority incapable of handling a crowd on such a scale.
But Zimbalist notes: “What we found, and what many of both the subjects we interviewed and a lot of the survivors who are still seeking justice would point out, is that this is a culture, a society, a government that is extremely well equipped and experienced at handling large crowds and has a culture of frequent protests – weekly protests in some instances. There are numerous examples where crowds of vast size are well handled.
“Then if you look at the exceptions, the Sewol ferry disaster of 2014 and this instance on 29 October last year in Itaewon, you have to ask, why not now? Why were these systems put into place successfully in other instances but not in these two? The obvious consistent factor between these two mass tragedies is that the majority of the attendees and the victims were of a younger generation.”
Photograph: Korea Center for Investigative Journalism – Newstapa(뉴스타파)/Courtesy of Paramount+The film shows how the grief of the first days after the disaster turned to anger, especially with the release of the transcripts of 11 emergency calls raising the alarm. Police have admitted that the officers who received the calls failed to handle them effectively.
Gaynor comments: “What stuck out to to me and to us is there was no ambiguity when you read the transcripts of those calls. It wasn’t, ‘somewhere in the city something big is happening’. The word ‘crushed’ was used in that very first call at 6.34pm and it continued from then in a very specific part – just a couple of streets – in a very crowded part of town and it continued. When that came out, public sentiment started to change and to ask questions and have anger: why did this happen and that perhaps there was something more to it.”
An official investigation blamed police and other government agencies for failing to take precautionary measures and for inadequate and inept rescue operations. Two mid-level officials killed themselves but the president of South Korea, Yoon Suk Yeol, and his cabinet ministers appear to be weathering the storm.
Victims’ families set up their own organisation and operated and guarded a memorial 24 hours a day in front of city hall while demanding answers. Zimbalist says: “It’s very moving to see these family members there in front of photos of the deceased at all hours of the day holding vigil. The families do not feel as if enough has been done and they believe a more comprehensive investigation needs to happen.
“There is an ongoing investigation with the prosecutor’s office but they believe more needs to be done because they don’t believe that they have, in many cases, basic answers as to: When did my child die? Where did my loved one die? Was it there on the street, was it in a hospital somewhere, was it in an ambulance? They feel they deserve – and anybody would agree – to at least have some answers.”
Gaynor adds: “As I think back to the time we spent in Korea, a word that kept coming up as we spoke to people both on camera and off camera, is trauma. Whether it was people who were there that night or citizens in Seoul or first responders or politicians or reporters, we heard how traumatic covering this story was, how traumatic being there was, how traumatic this was because of just how senseless it seems.
“We use that word a lot, of course, but this was not a terror attack, this was not a shooter – this was young people out for a good time and not doing anything wrong when the absolute unthinkable happened.”
Crush is out now on Paramount+
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