COMFORTLESS AR/VR Project

COMFORTLESS is a 360-3D cinematic immersive experience of American Town during its heyday in the 1980s that was established to incorporate and recruit women, so-called US Military comfort women, to serve the U.S. Air Force Base in Kunsan, South Korea. At the present time, the town is empty and silent after redevelopment designation. When the night falls, however, various sounds from the past begin to fill the space. Our project became a race against time to archive this history. Ironically, on the day we wrapped production, the South Korean Supreme Court announced its final verdict on a lawsuit filed by the women from the US military camp towns.

COMFORTLESS offers an immersive experience of the daily routine of American Town, creating an essential archive of the past. COMFORTLESS is the last part of Gina Kim’s virtual reality trilogy on US military comfort women in South Korea following BLOODLESS and TEARLESS. Shot on actual location, BLOODLESS is a VR experimental documentary that traces the last living moments of a real-life sex worker who was brutally murdered by a US soldier at the Dongducheon camptown in South Korea in 1992. TEARLESS, the second part of the trilogy is about a detainment center called “Monkey House”—a medical prison established by the South Korean government and staffed by the US military in the 1970s to isolate and treat camp town women with STDs. The US military comfort women physically embody the ruins and contradictions of the 20th century, as well as the violence against women and oppression of foreign individuals, and they have yet to receive recognition and reparations. In their honor, COMFORTLESS immerses the viewers in the daily routine of American Town, creating an essential archive of the past.