Director Im Kwon-taek's film Seopyeonje, adapted from the first and second parts — "Seopyeonje" and "The Light of Sound" — of novelist Yi Cheong-jun's linked short-story cycle "People of the Southern Provinces," premiered at Seoul's Danseongsa Theater in April 1993. Starring Kim Myung-gon, Oh Jung-hae, and Kim Kyu-chul, and shot by cinematographer Jung Il-sung, the film became the first in Korean cinema history to draw more than one million viewers in Seoul alone. The film, which portrays the sorrow and artistic devotion of a father-daughter pair of pansori singers, used the stone-walled lanes of Dangnak-ri, Cheongsan-myeon, in Wando County, as one of its primary filming locations.
The Seopyeonje location became an important factor in expanding Cheongsan Island's national tourism profile. There is not enough statistical evidence, however, to say that the island was unknown beforehand or that one film alone caused its tourism growth. What can be verified is that the film's celebrated five-minute-plus long take was shot around the stone-walled lane in Dangri and that the area remains a major point on the official Slow Road.
Wando County identifies the scene in which Yubong, Songhwa, and Dongho descend the lane singing Jindo Arirang as a five-minute long take. The location is a lived-in lane and agricultural landscape, not a closed set; homes and fields remain working spaces. The one-million-viewer claim refers to the period's Seoul admissions record and is not directly comparable with today's nationwide system. The coordinate is the actual filming location. Cheongsan requires a ferry, and journey times vary with vessel, season, and weather. This story asks how cinema reframed an existing island without claiming that cinema “discovered” a place with no prior history.