As the director and their friend, I accompany women confined and forced into marriage by the South Korean state as they file a lawsuit. I witness silence turn into testimony.
In 2024, I join Rosaria, Clara, Lucia and nine other survivors in filing a historic lawsuit against the South Korean government. They are long-hidden victims of state-run women’s detention centers. Rosaria was seventeen when she was forcibly confined to the Seoul Women’s Shelter in 1963. Authorities told her that if she agreed to marry and become a “proper wife,” she would be released. She consented to marry a man she had never met. After the forced marriage, Rosaria’s life unraveled. She eventually became a sex worker, and her life fell into a cycle of escape and re-confinement within the detention system. Although the role of the shelter as a confinement facility ended in 1994, Rosaria lived for decades under a silence imposed by shame and fear. Besides Rosaria, her friends, Lucia and Clara were. Lucia, imprisoned for three years simply for being an orphan, was forced into marriage as the price of her freedom. Clara, separated from her family for decades, lived under a cruel stigma after that. As a witness and friend, I observe how Rosaria, Lucia, and Clara slowly reclaim their dignity—through testimony, through friendship, and through the courage to be heard at last.
