An image that has circulated in reports since 2021 about a cinema brawl in China has been reshared in posts falsely claiming it shows two people fighting at a screening in South Korea of a documentary about the East Asian country’s founding president. The claim was repeatedly shared in Facebook groups made up of supporters of current President Yoon Suk Yeol after the film became a major hit among the country’s conservatives.
The false Korean-language claim was shared on Facebook on February 15, 2024.
The image — taken inside a cinema — shows what appears to be a man leaning on another man while a woman tries to restrain him.
Text embedded above the image reads: “A Commie was carried out on a stretcher after he was beaten by a conservative citizen for causing a scene at a screening of ‘The Birth of Korea’ at a theatre in Jeolla Province’s Gwangju.”
The post refers to “The Birth of Korea”, a documentary released in South Korea on February 1 about founding president Syngman Rhee, who ruled from its liberation from Japanese rule in 1945 until he was forced out of office in 1960 (archived link).
The Harvard and Princeton-educated leader — known for his staunch anti-communist stance — left behind a controversial legacy marked by extrajudicial killings and brutal repression of his political opponents (archived link).
However, the film’s director has told local media he wants to challenge historical narratives around the former president’s legacy and instead portray him as the founding father of a modern, liberal democratic South Korea (archived link).
The film became a major hit among the country’s conservatives, local media reported (archived link).
Similar false posts circulated in Facebook groups made up of supporters of South Korea’s conservative President Yoon Suk Yeol such as here, here and here, as well as on Naver Band.
Comments from some users indicated they were misled by the posts.
“These uneducated Commies. They reveal themselves so clearly wherever they go,” one user wrote.
“The only effective remedy for a Communist is a proper beating,” another said.
In reality, the image shows a scuffle that happened in a movie theatre in China’s eastern Anhui province in February 2021 — years before “The Birth of Korea” was released.
China theatre brawl
A reverse search on Baidu found a corresponding image published in a report from the state-run Beijing Evening News on February 16, 2021, about a fight that ensued between two men and two women in a movie theatre in the town of Ma’anshan in Anhui province (archived link).
According to the report, the image shows a fight that occurred during the screening of the Chinese comedy film “Detective Chinatown 3” (archived link).
Below is a screenshot comparison of the image shared alongside the false claim on Facebook (left) and the corresponding image published by Beijing Evening News in 2021 (right):
AFP found similar images and a clip of the incident published in several other Chinese media reports, including Yidian Zixun and public broadcaster Anhui TV (archived link).
The fracas was broken up by local police, the reports added, though they did not mention why it broke out.
Clips of the fight — in which bystanders can be heard telling the pair in Mandarin to “stop fighting” — were also shared by multiple Chinese social media accounts in February 2021, as seen for example in screenshots from Weibo and Bilibili below:
Signup bonus from
