‘The Last of the Sea Women’: How one director is documenting a South Korean tradition

Sue Kim’s first encounter with the sea women of South Korea was as a child. During a visit to Jeju Island, she spotted several women in wet suits putting on face masks. Haenyeo, or sea women, are free divers. Holding their breath, they harvest sea urchins, conch shells, and octopus.

“They just had this very bold, vibrant, confident energy,” says the documentary filmmaker, whose Korean parents emigrated to America. “I had not quite seen Korean women like that before.”

In the 1960s, there were an estimated 30,000 haenyeo. A peak. Now, there are only about 4,000. And they’re mostly grandmothers. Ms. Kim’s new documentary, “The Last of the Sea Women” (debuting Oct. 11 on Apple TV+), chronicles how they’re fighting to preserve their culture. In a Zoom interview that’s been edited for length and clarity, the director spoke with The Monitor about the resilience of the haenyeo.

Tell us about how these sea divers have helped elevate the place of women on Jeju Island.

Starting from the 17th century, these women became the breadwinners of their families. ... That is an island that really has survived and [been] supported off the backs of the labor of these women. If you go to Jeju, you see statues of haenyeo all along the island. It actually became a semimatriarchal island because of this sort of reverence and deep respect and appreciation that they have for the haenyeo. So they’re kind of trailblazers in terms of forging a path for women’s dominance in a society in a way that wasn’t contested [by] the patriarchal society.

What are the reasons why this way of life may go extinct?

We see this haenyeo school in the film. You can see these women trying to learn how to dive and they’re sputtering and they’re drinking seawater. That’s just part of it. The other part is you have to wake up at four in the morning most days and then dive in the cold ocean for hours. So there’s a physical, rigorous element to the work that can be off-putting for the younger generation.

The larger threat to this culture and this occupation is the environmental destruction of the ocean. Our haenyeo subjects that are in the film now are having a hard time finding enough marine life to sustain themselves financially to continue this occupation. Most of the subjects in our film, they also own farms and they do farmwork.

One haenyeo, Soon Deok Jang, says, “Men can’t handle this job.” Why?

Some of the scientific conjectures about why this might happen is that they thought women have a little bit more body fat and that could help contribute to being able to stay in the freezing cold water for longer periods of time. If you talk to Soon Deok Jang, there is this other philosophy, which is this idea of resilience and determination. They actually had to do it because the men stopped doing it at some point in history. There was also a very famous massacre that happened in Jeju. It’s called the 4/3 [April 3] massacre. This happened in 1948 [through 1949]. ... That left a lot of families without fathers, without husbands. So the women necessarily had to become the breadwinners and the backbones of their families. That’s when a lot of them really came to the haenyeo culture. They just have this reputation now of being absolutely determined, resilient, and enduring.

What did you learn about how haenyeo defy expectations of aging?

These are elderly women. But the minute they get in the water, they are elegant and athletic and so graceful. We didn’t even know this till we were really deep into filming with them, but they’re all widows. So these women have already outlived their husbands and they just have this physical agility that I think is built into them from decades of doing physically rigorous work. So it is a mental attitude.

The documentary also follows two young women who have become haenyeo. What do they love about their job?

They both came to this ancient, centuries-old tradition and occupation for very postmodern reasons. The younger haenyeo is 30 years old. She was working in an office, in a windowless cubicle for hours at a time. She really hated that life. Then she discovered the haenyeo occupation and discovered that she could work in the ocean for hours a day. Having that job revolve around being connected to the ocean, being connected to nature, utilizing her physicality, all of that was what she was looking for that she couldn’t find in her office life.

And then Jeongmin has a really interesting storyline. She didn’t even swim. I think she learned when she was 30, but she came to the haenyeo culture and tradition because her husband lost his job. They had three kids. She found this occupation. She can pick her hours around her children’s schedule. So she came to it because it was one of the very few occupations available for women in Korea that fully allow them to be as present for their families as they need to, and also bring in some financial income to the family.

What was your favorite moment of filming in the ocean?

My favorite one is at the very end with Kang Joo Hwa, our haenyeo that broke her foot. She’s kind of the best diver on the island. Then she suffered that terrible injury. We see her finally at the end of the film, returning to the water that she loves so much. At the end, we see her coming up and she just looks so kind of at peace and where she’s supposed to be, which is the water.