Movie tackles South Korean giant Samsung over worker illnesses
Crowd-financed movie takes on global giant over cancer cases at semiconductor plants as pressure mounts for compensation for victims
When his daughter Yu-mi won a job at the electronics company Samsung, Hwang Sang-ki was bursting with pride. Yu-mi would bring in enough money to support her struggling family and, she was hoping, it would pay her younger brother's way through university.
But in 2007, five years after she began work at the semiconductor plant of the South Korean consumer electronics firm, Yu-mi, 23, died, on the back seat of her father's taxi as he rushed her to hospital.
Friends told me not to do it, that it would be dangerous for my career
She had been diagnosed with a rare acute leukaemia 20 months earlier, a disease her father insisted was due to her exposure to chemicals at the Samsung plant in the city of Suwon.
Hwang's quest to prove his daughter died from a workplace-related illness has pitted him against the world's biggest technology company and timid South Korean media.
"I didn't believe Samsung when they told me Yu-mi's illness could not have been caused by her daily contact with those chemicals," said Hwang, whose suspicions were aroused when he learned that a colleague of his daughter had died from the same illness. "I talked to experts and took my findings to newspapers, TV companies and magazines, but they all said the same thing, 'you can't possibly win a fight with Samsung'."
But yesterday the silence surrounding the case of Yu-mi, and dozens of others who claim they fell ill after working at Samsung plants, was pierced by the nationwide release of a fictional film inspired by Hwang's decade-long search for the truth.