Can’t Koreans watch “Crush,” a U.S. documentary about the Itaewon tragedy?

Crush, a documentary about the Itaewon crowd crush was released in the United States, but viewers in South Korea cannot access it.

On October 17, Paramount released Crush, a two-part documentary, on its video streaming service, Paramount+. Crush is a documentary about the tragic crowd crush that killed 159 people in Itaewon, South Korea, on October 29, 2022. The makers of the documentary compressed 1500 hours of video, audio, and interviews into the final work.
The official three-minute trailer for Crush begins with footage of people excited to go to a Halloween festival just before the tragic event in Itaewon. Things take an abrupt turn. Screams are heard all around as people are constantly pushed into a narrow alley. “I started hearing alarm bells going off in my head. This isn’t safe anymore,” an American who was at the scene that day says in an interview. She had convinced a friend to go to Itaewon with her, only to lose her friend.

The crew interviewed several people who were there at the time. “We grabbed their arm and pulled them as hard as we possibly could, and they just would not budge,” says a U.S. soldier who tried to save those being crushed. The documentary is composed entirely of interviews and footage captured by citizens, with no narration. A shaky camera captures the desperation of one first responder who says, “We have to give up on people we can’t save and try to save those we can!”
The filmmakers question why this happened in a country with systems in place to handle large crowds, including demonstrations. They also show how grief turns to anger, noting the failure of the police and other agencies to act despite multiple emergency phone calls warning of the tragedy.

Jeff Zimbalist, the executive producer, mentioned the 2014 Sewol ferry disaster when speaking to The Guardian and said, “The obvious consistent factor between these two mass tragedies is that the majority of the attendees and the victims were of a younger generation.”
Paramount+ is not available in South Korea. If you try to access the official Paramount+ website in Korea, you will only get an error message and will not be able to view the content. Among domestic video streaming services, Tving carries Paramount+, but not all of the contents.

On social media, people posted reviews describing how they watched Crush by setting the VPN to another country.