“Escape from Mogadishu” (MA) **** and a half

THIS is not a “nice” movie. But it pulls no punches as it provides a commendable view of its discomforting topic.

Korean writer/director Ryu Seung-wan’s staging of events in the Somali capital Mogadishu early in November 1991 tells how staff at the embassies of South and North Korea set their differences aside and joined into one group while escaping from two feuding Somali groups. Geography, ethnicity and some history may unite them, but the divide between the diplomats of South Korea and North Korea living and working there was deep and seemingly irreconcilable.

The story’s point is less about the causes of the actual war than about the effects, seen against the horrors of violence on the city’s streets, of the conflict in general on a foreign country’s representatives for whose safety international law holds the host country responsible. 

As much as any cinematic re-creation of an historical event can do, Ryu’s film cleaves to actual events. While candidly setting out the shared cultural values of two embassies with irrevocably divided political positions, the staging of domestic and diplomatic conflicts is powerful and uncompromising, with some bias in favour of the South. 

“Escape from Mogadishu” gets all those stars because of its determined telling of things like they were as much as might be remembered three decades later. History’s funny like that – both ha-ha and peculiar.

At all cinemas