Neutrality under fire: the enduring power of Park Chan-wook’s DMZ thriller

Formally, the two Koreas are still at war until today: a South Korean officer facing his North Korean counterpart in the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between the two countries in a scene of "Joint Security Area". Screenshot

Joint Security Area, the first major film by legendary Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook, celebrated its 25^th anniversary. The mystery thriller set in the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) is a story of ambiguity and friendship across political divides - with a Swiss focus - that reveals the irreconcilable pressures of international neutrality. 

On October 13, 2000, Gunnar Berge, chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, announced that South Korean President Kim Dae-jung, had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for, among other achievements, his attempts to broker “peace and reconciliation with North Korea.”   

In June that same year, the veteran pro-democracy activist had crossed the Joint Security Area, a part of the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) near the village of Panmunjeom, to meet the North’s dictatorial leader, Kim Jong-il – a first for a South Korean president. 

Since 1953, this heavily fortified checkpoint where the two Koreas conducted limited diplomatic exchanges had been the domain of the Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission (NNSC), a peacekeeping force of Swiss, Swedish, Polish, and Czech soldiers acting as intermediaries.

By 1995, North Korea had expelled the Czech and Polish components from the NNSC following the collapse of communism, believing the NNSC had lost its neutrality. But the Swiss and Swedish forces remained, ostensibly to arbitrate future disputes. 

This tension – the thankless work of peacekeeping and the impossible demands neutrality imposes on a country – is at the heart of Park Chan-wook’s movie Joint Security Area (2000), the most successful Korean film of that period. It was released in cinemas almost exactly a month before Berge announced the first Korean winner of a Nobel Peace Prize. 

Joint Security Area (2000), set at the main checkpoint in Panmunjeom, highlights Switzerland’s role in mediating the fraught relations between the two countries – ties that have deteriorated considerably since the brief period of hope offered by Kim Dae-jung’s “Sunshine Policy” of engagement with its northern neighbour. 

Third time lucky

Park Chan-wook, then a little-known filmmaker who had made two artistic and commercial failures he was later to disown, adapted the novel DMZ as a last-chance project. He stuck to the book’s filtering of the Korean conflict through European eyes. This was a narrative device to mediate the South Korean audience’s relationship with the North, humanising North Korean soldiers as charming and complex players in the game of existence.  

In the extended prologue that opens the film, the Swiss-Korean army major Sophie E. Jean (Lee Young-ae) travels to the DMZ to mediate the aftermath of an armed confrontation between northern and southern troops. A group of seemingly friendly soldiers had clashed in the Joint Security Area, resulting in two deaths. 

South Korean audiences had been raised to hate everyone and everything from the North, particularly the communist country’s army. “At the time, it was still shocking to show them not as villains, but as ordinary people,” Park recently told the Korea Herald in an interview. 

Focusing the story on Swiss neutrality – with dramatic struggles as individuals grapple with its internal contradictions – allowed Park to explore Korean divisions from an outside perspective. It is one that shows both the idealistic “end of history” liberal spirit of the 1990s, as well as the political pragmatism of a neutral peacekeeping force. 

Yet the Korean director also shows how this neutrality is continually circumscribed by the designs of the two parties in the conflict, which manipulate the peacekeeping mission to achieve outcomes that will allow them to save face politically. 

Actress Lee Young-ae plays a Swiss officer in the DMZ. Screenshot

The story of soldiers from the two sides of the Korean Peninsula illustrates a depressing reality: that even a genuine friendship between enemy soldiers – here in the form of an almost metaphysical romance, kept secret from the authorities on both sides – cannot surmount the ideological gulf between the two nations. “There are two kinds of people in this world,” says one South Korean army captain. “Commie bastards, and commie bastards’ enemies… neutral has no place here [on the Korean peninsula].” 

When Park appeared last month at the Busan International Film Festival, where he presented his celebrated new film No Other Choice (2025) also starring JSA’s Lee Byung-hun, he was feted as nothing less than a distinguished master of Korean cinema.

Risk of arrest

During preparations for the filming of Joint Security Area, Park and his production company, Myung Films, were worried they might get arrested. South Korea’s National Security Act contained ambiguous clauses that could be used against any filmmaker who depicted soldiers from North Korea in a positive light, as they did. 

But their fears proved unfounded. Released in a period of détente between the North and South, Joint Security Area simultaneously revived the fortunes of domestically produced titles for the Korean audience and launched Park’s career. “I don’t even want to imagine what my life would look like if I hadn’t encountered that novel,” he wrote in a foreword for a 2023 new edition of the book. 

“It is a sad reality that this movie’s themes still resonate with the younger generation,” Park said while presenting the film in the Korean capital, Seoul, in September. “I hope that by the 50th anniversary, we will be able to discuss it as a story from the past.” 

Park Chan-wook arrives on the red carpet during the opening ceremony of the 30th Busan International Film Festival (BIFF), September 17, 2025. AFP

Neutrality as drama

Portrayals of Swiss peacekeepers are exceptionally rare in film history. But there are many films about people who try to impassively mediate conflicts only to be dragged into them, getting more emotionally involved and losing their objectivity. Park’s Joint Security Area is exceptional in that it dramatises the often-thankless task of international peacekeeping, where Switzerland has long been active.  

Switzerland’s role in the story is given an exotic twist to symbolise a far-off Western authority. In one scene, a suspect asks about major Jean’s background. In reply, she brandishes a Swiss army knife with the Swiss flag, holding it close to the camera. 

“What is important is not the outcome, but the procedure,” the head of the NNSC tells major Jean. “Your ultimate goal is to remain perfectly neutral, to provoke neither the North nor the South.” This maxim suggests something about the NNSC’s mythos and self-regard. Repeatedly, we see all the ways it is a mythology divorced from the real flow of events.  

Success at a price

Among film royalty. Park Chan-Wook (left) with his peers, members of the jury at the 70th Cannes Film Festival (2017): French actress Agnes Jaoui, US actor Will Smith, Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar and Chinese actress Fan Bingbing. Keystone-EPA/JULIEN WARNAND

Ultimately, major Jean succeeds in wresting the essential truth of the incident from the morass of conflicting accounts and deliberate evasion that make up Joint Security Area’s plot. But this comes at the expense of her career as a Swiss peacekeeper and in her losing any belief in the legitimacy of the operation. “Here the peace is preserved by hiding the truth,” her captain admits in a moment of clarity.  

She realises that the neutrality of the NNSC is used by both sides to launder their image and mask real disputes. Towards the end of the film, it emerges that Sweden and Switzerland refused 76 POWs after the Korean War, in part to maintain neutrality in the context of the NNSC. “I myself question just how humanitarian these two so-called neutral states really are,” declares the Swedish major, who has become increasingly cynical. In this neutral zone, truth is not uncovered, only further suppressed. 

Edited by Catherine Hickley/sb