Taipei, Taiwan — One Monday morning, 200 audience members settled their seats for a sold-out "K-Family Affairs" (in Korean "Aeguksonyeo"), a feature documentary, director Nam Arum's first, about her family, their patriotic zeal and disillusionment with South Korean democracy. It was screened by the Taiwan International Documentary Festival (TIDF), a superb, if underrated, film festival held biannually. TIDF flew Nam and others from countries like Argentina, Myanmar, Iran and Indonesia for screenings followed by Q&A. "K-Family Affairs'' won the Jury Prize for Asian Voices.

Born December 1993, Nam Arum's birthday shared with a twin sister — younger by a few minutes — landed on the day that South Korean democracy truly began, she says: the trial of Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo. Her mom, a feminist, was overjoyed by the coincidence. Her father, an activist broadcast journalist in university, was cheered by this auspicious start. An early adopter of the video camera, he filmed the girls' every coo, smile and birthday. Every five years, the presidential democratic election took place on her birthday. His home videos are cut with radio and television news broadcasts. She waves the flag and sings the national anthem. Democracy was a gift, the best gift she thought she could ever receive.

She'd inherited the ideals of her parents, members of the 386 generation who strove for democracy. Her parents met as university students. They both shared ambitions to change the world: Boy meets girl; boy interviews girl for the school newspaper; they start dating; then get married; and the rest is history.

Except not quite. After her father's military service, he joined the government as a civil servant, determined to change the system from the inside out. He'd become like the rest, her mother cautioned, just another suit. He countered, "As long as I have a girlfriend like you, I won't become like them." Famous last words, perhaps. From there on, Nam narrates and observes him change as a bureaucrat with a hand in the political tumult of each administration, and his completely close-lipped stance on government affairs.

The starkest moment of conflict occurs with the Sewol ferry disaster. Her father had been shunted from the Bureau of Public Affairs to Youth Affairs and finally to the Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries when the Sewol ferry disaster hit. Nam Arum was a high school student. Her mother, a crisis counselor and committed feminist, knew where she stood but Arum didn't.

While her classmates and her mother stood outside protesting the very office building where her father went to work, she kept silent, unable to outright reject her father and his public service. She says, "Though at the time I couldn't say anything, I gathered my letters and diaries, so even though I said nothing then, perhaps I was still making this documentary without making it."

After Sewol, her father was effectively promoted and shipped off to the presidential office — then known as the Blue House — to work under the Park Geun-hye administration. Despite her attempts to cajole him into making a political statement for or against the government on camera, he firmly refuses to consent to interview. In a poignant scene where she chases after him on his morning office commute as he walks to work and swipes his pass key, he says the president probably couldn't sleep. The echoes of protesters bounce off the mountains too loudly into the Blue House.

The film covers a lot of ground. Surface treatment of protests after protest, the Sewol ferry disaster, the Candlelit demonstrations, the #MeToo movement. The director documents her participation in the MeToo movement, an exhausting campaign to depose a professor who'd sexually assaulted students. He's given a slap on the wrist with three months probation. Her first-hand run-in with changing an entrenched system seems sadly representative.

Over footage of happy children playing in the water fountains of Gwanghwamun Square, she questions the state of South Korean democracy: This square where hundreds of thousands gathered to protest Park Geun-hye was razed and renovated. Protests there are illegal. She and her mom express their deep disillusionment with each election.

For a foreign audience, the significance of the Sewol ferry disaster may not quite translate. The national tragedy, prompting an outpouring of grief and outrage, became the galvanizing symbol for impeaching the president. Why? Perhaps if she'd voiced her questions about her father's role in the mishandling of the disaster, her awful struggle to confront and ask him, the film would've been stronger.

An interesting companion film might be the Zainichi film director Yang Yonghi's Pyongyang trilogy, which also documents her rocky relationship with her parents' tragic, unflagging patriotism to North Korea as ethnic Koreans living in Japan.

A lively Q&A followed the showing. Nam shared the wholly positive feedback she'd received. Her mother became a minor celebrity in South Korea, and her younger sister regretted not appearing in the film more. Her father did not comment. But above all, he did not intervene in her making it. "If I don't say anything, then the problems in Korean society might get to the point I couldn't make documentaries," Nam said. "Once my dad retires from working for the government, I want to make a similar work. I hope we can meet again in Taiwan."

Esther Kim is a freelance writer based in Taiwan. She was a senior manager at the Asian American Writers' Workshop in New York and Tilted Axis Press in London and a publicist at Columbia University Press. She writes about culture and the Koreas.