Director 류승완 originally planned a new film after "Veteran" is "Dawn's Eyes", but because of copyright issues, it aborted, so he switched to "The Battleship Island".
The Battleship Island is an island 18 kilometers away from Nagasaki Port. The people on the Korean peninsula who were brought here were forced to dig coal mines in coal mine tunnels 1,000 meters below the seabed with temperatures as high as 40 degrees. According to the “Basic Survey on the Victims of the Dead People on the Korean Peninsula by the Forced Requisition of Hashima Coal Mine” in 2012, about 800 Korean people have been forcibly requisitioned to work here. Japan also applied for The Battleship Island as a heritage of modern industrial facilities in 2015, which aroused public outrage
.
According to information released by Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs after the war, nearly 40,000 people were forcibly conscripted to Japan during World War II, of which more than 3,700 were forced to work in coal mines at various factories owned by Mitsubishi Corporation, resulting in 722 deaths. Among them, there are not only laborers from the Korean Peninsula, but also Chinese laborers. A reporter from Xinhua News Agency visited The Battleship Island in 2015 and found that it was difficult to find information on the victimized labor in the text introduction and on-site commentary of the "The Battleship Island" site. He also said that this bloody world heritage deliberately concealed the evil behind it
.
The film is based on the actual history of the Koreans being forced to work on The Battleship Island during the Japanese Occupation. It also adds the imagination of director 류승완 and tells the story of being taken to The Battleship Island, the scene of forced labor. The process by which people on the Korean peninsula fled because of unbearable oppression
.
