The S. Korea movie, Harmony (2010) is a movie I enjoy showing my students in both my Korean and choral music classes.
It is based on a true story that takes place in a women's prison, and the inmates form a choral group and it inspires them and gives them a small joy and a new purpose and inspiration in their imprisoned life. They become known and even get a special invitation to come out to
Seoul to perform as a special guest group in a choral festival.
The movie reveals a culture of suppressed women, some who were driven to extreme situations, causing them to act out of norm and commit crimes and ending up in incarceration.
Among the unfortunate circumstance is of a woman who is serving a sentence for inadvertantly killing her mentally ill husband who has symptoms of morbid suspicion of his wife's faithfulness and is physically abusive to her even while she pregnant with their child. She ends uphaving her baby in prison and is able to raise her son til he is 18 months old. When the time come to part with her son, she makes the decision to release him for adoption instead of having a relative take care of him in order to allow him to have a clean start with another family where he won't be marked as a son of a murderer.
This movie beautifully builds up to climax with a surprise ending that induces many layers of pure and natural human emotions that makes you shed tears of empathy, rage, feelings of awe from witnesssing beautiful kindness as well as in response to sacrifial love of a mother towards her child.
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