S. Korea’s 2024 martial law crisis being adapted for big screen
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People watch a news report on the sentencing trial of South Korean former president Yoon Suk Yeol's insurrection case in Seoul, on Feb 19.
PHOTO: REUTERS
SEOUL – A film tentatively titled Martial Law 12.3, which would be the first narrative feature based on former President Yoon Suk Yeol’s short-lived imposition of martial law on Dec 3, 2024, has locked in its cast and will begin shooting in the first half of 2026, production company IP Box Media 1 said on Feb 25.
Written and directed by award-winning screenwriter Park Kyung-soo (The Chaser, 2012; Punch, 2014 to 2015), the movie carries the subtitle PM 10:24, a nod to the time Yoon appeared in a televised address to declare martial law. It pieces together the behind-the-scenes manoeuvring that led to the decree.
Actor Gong Hyung-jin, whose last screen credit was 2022’s Hidden, plays the lead role as a former prosecutor general-turned-president who reaches for emergency powers. The character is a thinly veiled stand-in for Yoon, himself a career prosecutor who won the presidency in 2022.
Lee Ga-ryeong and Lee Sang-hoon round out the principal cast.
On the night of Dec 3, 2024, Yoon declared martial law in a late-night televised address,
Troops were sent to the National Assembly and National Election Commission, which Yoon alleged had overseen fraudulent elections.
Lawmakers broke through police barricades and scaled fences to reach the parliamentary floor, as crowds of people gathered to rally outside the National Assembly. A total of 190 lawmakers, including members of Yoon’s own party, voted unanimously to overturn the decree within hours.
Following an impeachment vote in parliament some two weeks later, Yoon was formally removed from the presidency by a unanimous decision at the Constitutional Court on April 4, 2025. He was arrested, tried and convicted of insurrection on Feb 19, receiving a life sentence.
The martial law crisis has spawned multiple documentaries and politically charged productions, but Martial Law 12.3 marks the first proper narrative feature based on the event.
The closest precedent on the fiction front is The Pact, a dramatised account of the former first lady Kim Keon Hee’s rise to power that sold more than 800,000 tickets in June, despite a limited theatrical release. THE KOREA HERALD/ASIA NEWS NETWORK
