A true story of a young leader of pro-democracy movement in 1980s. In September 1985, when the ideology between South and North Korea is sharply opposed, South Korean democracy activist Kim Geun-tae was forcefully dragged to Namyoung, where the government’s national security agency is located at. There he met Lee Doo-han, the professional interrogator who was notorious for the ruthless torture. With a distorted patriotism toward the South Korean military regime, Lee detained Kim over 20 days and tortured him with water and electricity, until he confessed that he was under the control of North Korea. After 20 years from that nightmare, Kim confronts Lee again. Staring at Lee with vacant eyes, Kim asks himself: “Will I ever be able to forgive him?” Screenwriter and director of both fiction and documentary films, Chung Ji-young is considered the most representative South-Korean filmmaker of the 1990s. For the critic Darcy Paquet (KoreanFilm.org), NATIONAL SECURITY was “the best Korean film of 2012”.
