An on-scene chronicle of the siege of South Korea’s parliament in 2024, Seoul Guardians was not on my radar when I was looking at the listings for the NZIFF.
In December of that year, president Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law and referred to the opposition parties as supporters of North Korea.
This self-coup ended when parliamentarians passed a motion to cancel his declaration.
The president would later be impeached.
Happening a month after the US re-elected Donald Trump, it felt ironic.
Trump had also attempted a coup four years earlier, but he had not been punished - and he was rewarded with a return to power.
South Korea’s response felt like a model of how to defend democracy.
Part of the reason for this rapid response - from MPs and ordinary citizens - is context.
South Korea had gone through a series of authoritarian governments, an era which only came to an end in the late eighties.
This is not the distant past or a hypothetical fear, something this film makes clear from the outset, intercutting the siege with brief cutaways to the infamous Gwangju massacre of 1980, an enduring symbol of the South Korean dictatorship, and the desire to avoid reverting back to it.
The film does not dwell on these events, preferring to let them linger in the background - the unspoken threat of how this attempted coup could have turned out.
There is some narration, but most of the film is presented as a fly on the wall, intercutting between different news cameras and phones - providing a truly subjective impression from inside the parliament.
There is a raw immediacy and claustrophobia to this footage, as we are placed among the staffers struggling to barricade the doors against the military units trying to shut down proceedings.
It is chilling and - despite knowing how it resolved - incredibly tense.
Watching legislators try to follow processes while soldiers are literally outside the doors emphasises how tenuous democracy truly is.
And even though the coup attempt was thwarted, there is no sense of catharsis:
The film ends intercutting the anti-government protests with the president’s supporters.
The President’s coup may have failed - but the forces he represents remain.
Seoul’s guardians have won this one battle, but the fight for democracy will continue.
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