Miracle in Cell No. 7

        My English teacher gave me a DVD. The title of the movie was Miracle in Cell No. 7. At the first time I attracted by the cover. There was a little girl set inside the cartoon box. It was written there “Kids off limits” and “deliver me to my father”. The story in Miracle in Cell No. 7 was a family movie. The story in “Miracle in Cell No. 7” was simple, but I realized the power of this movie. The characters of the actors, especially Yong-gu and Ye-seung brought my self of being a part of them. The flash back plot gave me an insight about the feeling of loosing my power. In the mind of being a father with mental problems, I thought that I got angry at the time. It made this movie sentimental and touch.

        I want to simplify this movie from the locations and the families in the movie. Four families were presented in the movie, the family of Yong-gu, of the police commissioner, of the sheriff, and one of the prisoner family. The families were separated because of some problems and not all of them accepted the problem as a part of their life. Some of them struggled to solve but some blamed others.  There were four major places, the house of Yong-gu, the street, the prison, especially in cell no. 7, and the court. Why the title of this movie was Miracle in Cell No. 7?

           The movie was started with young Ye-sung who received the reports about the case of her father and her meeting of the former prisoners. The flash back started while she defended her opinion about the case in the court. The story flowed slowly by the life of Yong-gu and his only daughter, Yea-seung. They were poor but happy. Yong-gu was a single parent and he had a mentally problem. Twice a day they visited a storefront where a coveted Sailor Moon backpack was displayed. Yong-go desperately wanted to buy for his daughter the Sailor Moon backpack, but he could not buy it. When the backpack was bought, Yea-seung was sad. Yong-gu was hit by the father of the little girl who bought the backpack as he innocently insists, through his stuttering, that the bag belongs to his daughter.

          One day a little girl offered a help to take Yong-gu to another store which sold it, he followed her until he heard a sudden and short scream. He found the little girl lied in the street with a head wound, and didn’t understand enough to know that she was dead. He only knew the CPR and he wanted to help the girl. The dead girl was the police commissioner’s daughter. Yong-gu was unfairly blamed as a kidnaper and killer. In truth, the poor man just didn’t know any better, and didn’t even know enough to understand his situation. He couldn’t defend himself, and worst of all, no one who should seemed to care. Yea-seung was there, when the police brought his father away to the prison.

Yong-go entered the prison as a kidnaper and killer. He remembered his daughter and he wantend to call, but he had no chance. He was separated with his daughter who never knew where he was. Ye-sung  was sent to an orphanage and joined  a Christian ministry event that had time to visit the prison. There were a group of gangster stayed in cell no. 7 hit Yong-gu because he was a murderer. When the leader of the gangster was attacked by another gangster, Yong-go saved him. His sacrifice gave him chance to ask something from the gangster. He just wanted to see his daughter and let her back to him.

           The time when one of the prisoner brought Ye-sung  to the cell no.7 was very complicated. The scene really touched myself. The cover was clearly presented during the movie. My mind took me back to the letter that written on the cover, kids off limits and deliver me back to my father. The short visit turned into an extended stay, as Yong-gu’s cellmates realized that it was easier to sneak her into prison than to sneak her out. The presence of Ye-sung helped them to realize that they were an actual criminal and Yong-gu was not like them. All the cellmates acted like uncles to her and hid her from the prison’s chief. They got a little family in the cell no. 7.

        The presence of Yong-gu in the prison changed the perspectives of prisoners and the prison’s chief. The little Ye-sung brought joy into each of their lives with understanding far beyond her years, as she did good deeds like taught the illiterate for the leader So how to read. She smuggled a cell phone in so Bong-shik can call his pregnant wife. Chief Jang  assumed that Yong-gu was guilty of his crimes. The chief had a young son who he lost. He found that Yong-gu had crime of killing a child so heinous. Yong-gu showed him how he loved life and gave meaning for life. Yong-gu didn’t hesitate to save the chief from a burning room. Obviously, Yong-gu didn’t save people with any other intention but saving them. It was not like he threw his life on the line to move the chief’s heart. Jang figured out that Yong-gu couldn’t have committed the crime which he was accused of.

          He was inspired  and moved by the relationship of Yong-gu and his daughter. He not only began to allow Ye-sung to visit, he actually facilitated her visits by picked her up from school only to dropped her off with her prison uncles. They were family, there came a point where all the uncles band together to help Yong-gu for his upcoming trial, playing out the crime scene with all its possible results until they can glean what actually happened with the little girl. They finally come to the conclusion that the little girl he was accused of killing merely slipped on ice and hit her head. It wasn’t even a murder, it was just a terrible accident.

     The police commissioner’s determination to see Yong-gu paid dearly for his crime. The police commissioner made the story as his own issue. In the mind of the police commissioner the law became blind. He could not see the problem clearly and it became difficult to find justice. The police commissioner took Yong-gu’s state of mind to declare that Yong-gu was guilty no matter what. In this fact, we have to assume that the code of law was easy to manipulate.

       The prisoners spend countless hours to drill Yong-gu on what to say to the judge and just how to profess his innocence. They worked around Yong-gu’s learning disability by drilling him at all times of the day to test his readiness, and by having him memorize a statement as best he can. Even Chief Jang got a petition from the prisoners together to give to Yong-gu’s public defender, only to be disgusted when the lawyer proves he has no intentions of protecting Yong-gu or fighting for a fair trial.

Yong-gu’s daughter, Ye-sung grew-up, became a lawyer and tried to prove her father’s innocence in court. In the present, she’s able to look back on all the evidence and prove just how faulty and wrong it all was, but she’s unable to change the past. Yong-gu had no such defender then, which is why he went straight to jail to await sentencing. The closing of this movie really remind me that the main scene was in prison. The last role played the scene of Ye-sung when she left the prison.

        From the beginning I felt that the power of this movie was in characters. There was nothing preventing us from following Yong-gu, little Ye-sung, all the prison uncles and even Chief Jang on their separate but connected journeys—even if the emotional wallop hits close to home. All the characters came to realize, Yong-gu was a wonderful man and an even better father, someone worthy of living a full and happy life. That was what inherently made the basic premise of this film so heartbreaking out of the starting gate: that we know Yong-gu was imprisoned for something he not only didn’t do, but couldn’t have done.

Perhaps most striking about Yong-gu as a character was watching how hard he tried to understand and comprehend, since the moments which really stayed with me after the movie ended were his moments of clarity. The very look in his eyes would shift and change when he could grasp just enough of any given situation to make decisions based on the person he loved more than anything and would give anything for: his daughter. This was a love story about family, pure and simple. Prison inspired them to change their life, to start a new life, and to continue a mission.