Mal-Mo-E: The Secret Mission

Mal-Mo-E: The Secret Mission is a 2019 South Korean historical drama film written and directed by Eom Yu-na. It was released on January 9, 2019. The title refers to an old Korean dialect word which roughly translates to "collecting vocabularies."

Synopsis
Imprisoned several times during the 1940s, when Korea was under Japanese occupation, Kim Pan-Soo is illiterate and does not know how to read or write Korean or any other language. The teaching of Korean in the schools is banned by the Imperial government. He meets a representative of the Korean Language Society and join forces to publish a dictionary of the Korean language.

Historical context
The film is based on historical events in Korea during the late 1930s to 1940s. When Korea was under Japanese Imperial rule, the Korean language was "demoted" in status and significance and eventually outright banned in 1938 in favor of the Japanese language. The characters were based on the real-life scholars and members of the Korean Language Society who continued working on the dictionary even after the ban was enforced. In 1942, more than thirty of the group were arrested and imprisoned by the Japanese and two died in prison. The Korean Language Society did not resume activities until Korea re-gained independence after Japan surrendered to the Allies in 1945.

Reception
The film debuted on top of the South Korean box office, where it earned $8.96 million from 1.19 million admissions between Wednesday and Sunday.

Local reviews of the film were largely positive, with South Korean English-language newspaper The Korea Times commending the film for being able to tell "the same old story of these historical figures....but in a fashionable way".