New Crowd-funded Film Aims to Reignite Debate Over Korea's Largest Conglomerate

Teaser poster of "One Another Family" [tentative title], posted on online social funding website GOODFUNDING on November 1, 2012. [One Another Family Production Committee]

Korean film professionals are seeking for their chance to make another controversial film with online crowd-funding in the hope to take a new turn for long-pending social issue.

On November 1, a new big screen project tentatively titled “One Another Family” production committee made public a teaser video for the film’s one-month social fundraising on social funding website GOODFUNDING.

Though it is already done with pre-production stages including scriptwriting, casting and location hunting, the production committee is having difficulties with funding due to its sensitive topic, the committee said.

“One Another Family,” the slogan being used in Samsung Electronics' commercials, is a fiction drama based on a true story of a taxi driver who investigates the death of his 21-year-old daughter. His daughter and her several other colleagues who work at Korea's biggest semiconductor factories face death after suffering from leukemia over two years.

A total of 155 former semi-conductor laborers are reported to have been suffering from occupational disease such as leukemia and Lou Gehrig's disease, as of March this year. Reports say 62 of them have already passed away and most of the patients are known to have worked at factories under Samsung affiliated companies.

Samsung officials have been dodging the responsibility by arguing these are personal illness. Hwang Sang-gi, the film's real-life model whose daughter died after working at one of Samsung semiconductor plants, is the first man to throw the serious matter into the light.

When director Kim Tae-yoon made a firm determination to make the tragic true story into a film, a number of stellar actors and staffs including Park Chol-min and Yun Yu-Sun have decided to take part in the movie.

Aiming to raise 100 million Korean won [about 91,591 U.S. Dollars], 619 film lovers with good will have already donated over 30 million in six days since the opening of online fundraising.

In the meantime, the first crowd-funding-powered film “26 Years” have attracted 15,000 public sponsors who are offering a total of 700 million won, which is equivalent to about 15 percent of its required budget, 4.6 billion.

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