Filmmaker tells his father’s story in a film to honor Korean War children | By Martha Vickery (Winter 2025)
Actor/producer Arnold Chun is creating his dream film, and he needs to do it on a schedule. The time crunch is because of the age of the target audience – he wants Korean American elders like his parents to be able to see it before time runs out for them.
The future film Children of War is now quite a few steps past being just a dream. There is a producer and a director on board, and some of the cast has been hired. Chun created a concept trailer for the crowdfunding site GoFundMe. He has also scouted some locations in Korea to use for the film.
The story describes the lives of child survivors of the Korean War. A group of kids, abandoned by family or orphaned during the Korean War, band together to survive. They live on the streets, digging through garbage, begging or stealing food to stay alive. Some hide together in makeshift camps to avoid North Korean soldiers who kidnapped abandoned kids for forced conscription as child soldiers.
The story is the filmmaker’s father’s story. It is also a description of thousands of children across Korea who were innocent victims of war. Parents died, homes were bombed, families fled and sometimes in the confusion and desperation, children were separated from their parents. Few survived. Of these child war survivors, only a small group of elders in the U.S. and Korea as eyewitnesses of this era.
Chun relates that until he was an adult, he hardly believed his dad’s story of being abandoned as a pre-teen and surviving the war. It was too far removed from the filmmaker’s middle-class upbringing in California. “I remember guilt trips my dad put on me for wanting something like that pair of Air Jordans that had just come out. He would tell me ‘I didn’t even have my first pair of shoes until I was 16.’ Or ‘Don’t complain about the food. You’d better eat every bite of food on that plate. Do you know how long I went without food, and how much I had to struggle, and how difficult it was for us to find food?’”
In the midst of teenage self-absorption, he said, he dismissed the statements his dad made about the extreme childhood deprivation he once experienced. It was years, Chun said, before he could really hear the story. As he got older, and became a film and TV storyteller, he became more interested in the stories of both his parents of their childhood in wartime Korea, and they eventually opened up. He internalized their stories, wondering what to do with them.
About 14 years ago, after accruing years in the film business, Chun described how he finally sat his father and uncle down and got each of their stories on a recording and on paper. From that, he wrote a first draft of a screenplay. Then he put it away, not ready to go to the next step. A little over a year ago, he said, his brother urged him to continue with the project, even if it was produced as just a short film, so that his father and other survivors of that generation would be able to see the film before they pass away.
Some of those child survivors, like his dad, and can still tell their own stories. Others died as children, their stories never known to history. Through eyewitness accounts woven into imagined stories, Chun wants to create a film that will honor them all. The story will also appeal to a broader audience as a human story about the many millions worldwide, past and present, whose lives are upended by war.
Chun is fundraising for this project. Right now it is planned as a 25-minute short film, which could be used for fundraising events by Korean American groups or veterans’ organizations and could also be used as a proof-of-concept for a future feature-length film.
The film will concentrate on the stories of two brothers, Chun’s father Young Il Chun, and his uncle Keun Jong Chun, who was the elder brother by about nine years. Their father had been killed by the Japanese (during the Japanese occupation years, prior to 1945), and their mother was raising the two brothers by herself. When elder son Keun Jong did not come home one day, their mother set off to find him, leaving the younger son, Young Il, at home alone.
“The war started a couple days later, then the house my dad was staying in got damaged by artillery fire,” Chun explained. The house was uninhabitable “and that’s how he ended up on the streets with a bunch of orphans who banded together and became an orphan-posse gang, just trying to survive the streets of Korea until the armistice happened.”
Keun Jong had a different story of what happened to him during the war. A stranger offered him some some bags of rice one day, and when got into the truck to get the food, he was detained at gunpoint, and driven with other teens to North Korea to be a child soldier. He was put to work for the North Korean army, burying dead bodies and doing menial work. Later, Keun Jong was forced to fight with the North Korean troops against South Korea. He eventually deserted his troop and joined up with a gang of kids in the mountains, hiding and waiting for the war to end. He and the other kids were captured, threatened and nearly killed at gunpoint by South Korean soldiers. They somehow persuaded the troops they were on the South Korean side, and Keun Jong joined up with the Republic of Korea army after that.
During the war, while wandering and homeless, Young Il, at about age 11, managed to find the home of an aunt in another town. Through her, he found his mother, but she had gotten married to a man who had two younger sons. Young Il was not welcome and was verbally and physically abused by his new stepfather. He left that household and wandered some more.
The armistice happened in July of 1953, and Keun Jong’s capture by the South Korean army was in the spring of ’53. After the armistice, Keun Jong “went to a South Korean army base and for the next eight or nine months, spent time looking for my dad in Seoul,” Chun explained. “He found my dad at some child center or orphanage place in 1954.”
Chun still marvels at this part of the story – how his uncle used all the time he had to search for months, in a poverty-stricken and devastated country, never giving up hope that his little brother was still alive. When his uncle died about seven years ago, and the whole family went to his funeral, “I never saw my dad cry so hard,” he recalled.
After Keun Jong found his younger brother, Chun explained, he had to figure out a place for Young Il to live – and not with their mother who (he believed) had abandoned them. Keun Jong asked the army base for help, and they helped him place Young Il in the home of a nearby Korean couple. From then on, Young Il grew up with that couple and thought of them as his parents. In 1988, while travelling with their dad in Korea, Chun and his brother met their dad’s adoptive parents and their birth grandmother.
“I remember when I first visited them, I was confused about ‘who are these people?’ “ Chun recalled. His dad had introduced them as his parents, “but I was like, ‘they can’t be your mom and your dad, because we just stayed with your mom so who are these people?’” It took years for Chun and his brother to piece together the story of their dad’s and uncle’s childhood years.
Chun never heard his birth grandmother’s own life story, including first losing her husband, and then losing track of both of her sons. Now, he wishes he had been able to hear her version of those years. As a younger teen visiting Korea, he had trouble absorbing the reality of his dad’s childhood. In terms of his grandmother’s story, he reflected “I really wasn’t old enough, and I did not have the maturity for it.”
He remembers noticing during the childhood trip to Korea that his dad was “awkward” with his birth mother. “And when she died, my father and uncle did not go to her funeral. That spoke a lot about how they viewed her,” he said.
These days, Chun said, he tries to understand his grandmother’s predicament and that of his father and uncle, from the perspective of surviving those impossible times. In creating the film, he said, he would like to find other survivors who were once abandoned children during the war and hear their stories. He also wants to tell some imagined stories, of kids who survived by hiding in the mountains, or were forcibly drafted and became child soldiers, or ended up in orphanages.
Chun plans to fund the film through individual donations and through sponsorship by organizations, including American veterans’ organizations, since many veterans helped abandoned children during war. The GoFundMe site explains about the “why” of the film and its purpose of recognizing this special group of war survivors.
The filmmaker wrote in a recent text that he is re-setting his expectations for speedy funding commitments, since the dire need of victims of the Los Angeles fires has temporarily diverted attention and resources of charitable organizations from other projects.
As a young adult, Chun majored in history at University of California at Irvine, did various jobs in his early career, including coaching children’s sports, teaching Sunday school, teaching in an exchange program in Japan, and working at a large engineering firm. His career in Hollywood started around 2007 when he was asked by a friend to help on a movie set while on a hiatus between jobs. He accepted, and became fascinated at how a movie is put together. During that short time on the set he helped out “with coffee and errands, actually got to drive a police vehicle from the rental agency to the set – that was quite an exhilarating experience because people actually do slow down,” he said.
During his volunteer stint, he had conversations with director Eric Kim about the film business and its opportunities. Kim persuaded and encouraged him to become an informal apprentice and learn the business of film and entertainment production. He accepted, and now, 21 years later, Chun has worked in production with some of the most famous directors. “I got to spend three and a half weeks with Clint Eastwood on Letter from Iwojima, got to work on Michael Bae on Transformers 2, and with actor/director David Schwimmer on an HBO series,” he said.
His career continued to move in an upward direction “even though I never thought it could be a career path,” he said. He expresses surprise that he made it in such a tough business. The fierce competition, and “just being an Asian American” meant that there were very few opportunities for upward mobility in the field.
Auditioning in Hollywood as an Asian American, until very recent years, “was always like samurai, ninja guy, laundromat owner, liquor store owner, tourist who can’t speak English, interpreter, Japanese game show host, North Korean soldier, North Korean Communist insurgent – ths list goes on and on,” he said. This kind of systemic discrimination pushed him towards directing, with the goal of putting people of color in meaningful parts, and at center stage.
Chun independently produced and directed the film Eli’s Liquor Store, (2007) about a black liquor store owner in Los Angeles during the era of the LA Riots. Chun chose the time period because it was a pivotal time in his youth, and because it was an era of racial reckoning in Los Angeles. The film “flipped the switch” on the usual roles in that setting, since the store owner was Black, not Korean, and the customers were a mix of people with a community in common.
The film was screened in African American and Asian film festivals, and was nominated for a Melvin Van Peebles Trailblazer Award, an award of the Critics’ Choice Association of Black Cinema, among other awards. Screening the film at festivals gave him rare opportunities to discuss his goals in promoting diversity in the film business, and to unpack the events of the LA Riots with Black and Asian American community members.
Being a teen at the time of the LA Riots also made him passionate about how he, as a second generation person, had a duty to preserve and memorialize Korean American history “and how our stories and our culture is intertwined with the fabric of American history.”
The untold stories of his parents – and other Korean American elders – are presenting a particular mission for Chun. “As a filmmaker, and as a person on this journey, it became evident to me that if we don’t listen to our families’ stories and if we don’t preserve the cultural lineage of our families, then how can we pass that on?” he said.
Chun thinks specifically of his three sons, age nine and six and four, and other Korean American parents whose immigrant parents have similar stories of their childhood. He remembers how, as a kid, he thought his dad was just guilt-tripping him with the stories of his childhood, when actually he was telling him the unvarnished truth.
Chun said he wonders if his skepticism was because there was no historical frame of reference for him to learn from – whether some historical knowledge would have helped him imagine his parents growing up in wartime in another country. But there were no films about their stories in those days, and “the Korean War part of most high school history books was just a paragraph,” he said.
Chun believes a film, particularly one that puts children in the storyteller role, is a perfect learning tool to tell history to kids. He also thinks it has to be an independent production “You can’t really wait around for Hollywood to want to do something,” he said. His film will appeal to kids, but it will also reach a broad audience of adults.
Chun was able to engage Young Woo Suh as the producer on the Korean side (Suh also produced the hit Korean American romance Past Lives in 2023). Chun also scouted sites in Korea, and has chosen several Korean child actors for the main parts. There is an estimated budget of $500,000 for the 25-minute short, including some funding for public relations and marketing.
Chun said every group he has talked to has expressed support and enthusiasm. He reached out to more than 70 veterans’ groups in late November, he said, and “it was so humbling because a lot shared their own stories and were very supportive of what I am trying to do.”
2025 is the 75th anniversary of the June 25, 1950 start of the Korean War, and there will be many commemorative events in South Korea and in the U.S. However, to do the film in the first half of 2025 in time for the anniversary events would be challenging at this point, particularly because funding is still not secured. Plan B, he said, is to make the film during the second half of 2025, in time for the winter galas of veterans’ and Korean American organizations that could screen it.
Despite the enthusiastic support, he said “it has still been quite challenging to get the funding to make this come to life.” It comes down to finding the right individual, organization or group of organizations now, he said. Everything is lined up, he said, and “we just need to execute!”
The GoFundMe site for Children of War with a trailer explaining the project, is at this link. There is also an Instagram site for the film at: childrenofwarshortfilm, and a website at: https://childrenofwarshortfilm.com.
