

Where you are born is called “hometown”. What do you call where you are buried? A story about 8 North Koreans who went to Moscow Film School in 1952, and sought political asylum in 1958 after denouncing KIM Ilsung. Their lives as Koreans and as filmmakers are captured through images from Moscow to Kazakhstan.


Where you are born is called “hometown”. What do you call where you are buried? A story about 8 North Koreans who went to Moscow Film School in 1952, and sought political asylum in 1958 after denouncing KIM Ilsung. Their lives as Koreans and as filmmakers are captured through images from Moscow to Kazakhstan.
2019-05-02
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0.0A group of women climbs a summer mountain situated in South Korea. They are refugees who have settled into South Korean society after fleeing from North Korea. For them, climbing the mountains has been an unavoidable journey for survival - a matter of life and death.
6.9True crime meets global spy thriller in this gripping account of the assassination of Kim Jong-nam, the half brother of the North Korean leader. The film follows the trial of the two female assassins, probing the question: were the women trained killers or innocent pawns of North Korea?
6.3The story of Cuban refugees who risked their lives in homemade rafts to reach the United States, and what life is like for those who succeed.
6.0In Maija Blåfield’s documentary, eight former North Koreans talk about what it was like to watch illegal films in a closed society. In addition to the 'waste videos', South Korean films were also smuggled into the country via China.
5.5"A Postcard from Pyongyang" is a journey into a deeply enigmatic and completely isolated country that keeps the world in suspense: North Korea. Friends Gregor Möller, Philip Kist and Anne Lewald visit in 2013 and 2017 and do what is strictly forbidden and for which they might have ended up in a forced labor camp: even though accompanied by state watchers, they secretly film their travels, accompanied by state watchdogs. We get an extraordinary insight into one of the most closed societies in the world and experience the 'beautiful new world' as the state propaganda machinery displays it.
6.5If the cityscapes and patriotic anthems of this film seem a far cry from the bleak landscape of Seoul Train, that's no accident. Dutch filmmaker Pieter Fleury, with the full permission and cooperation of the North Korean government, created this propaganda film that gives us a glimpse of a day in the life of one of the world's most enigmatic societies. A Day in the Life, largely dictated by the North Korean film bureau, follows a typical North Korean family through their daily duties, largely dedicated to the pride in the North Korean nation of comrades and the glory of General Kim Jong Il. The film is meant to extol the success of modern North Korea. But does it? With straight footage and a total absence of narration, viewers may interpret Fleury's film in a slightly different manner than intended
0.0Eunmi, a woman who underwent intense anti-communist education while she grew up in South Korea, lives a normal life in America. However, after going on a trip to North Korea with her husband, her life begins to change. During an open forum event in South Korea, where she was invited to speak, she suffers the unimaginable, and the more she tries to escape from the situation, the worse and worse it gets.
7.0Interpreting an event of ROKS Cheonan corvette, torpedoed and sunken by North Korea, this documentary rebuilds the event with a different insight. No one can tell if the investigation of Cheonan has reached compelling conclusion. But the film tells and reveals how unreasonable Korean society is.
8.1Defilada was made on the occasion of the 40th anniversary celebrations of state's founding in North Korea, which the regime intended to use to eclipse the 1988 Summer Olympics taking place that year in Seoul, South Korea. The North Korean regime invited filmmakers from countries then considered friendly (read: Communist), including People's Republic of Poland, which sent a team under Andrzej Fidyk. The documentary is primarily composed of declarative statements, as well as texts of North Korean newspapers and books. There was no author's commentary. Fidyk commented that he and his team were likely “the most disciplined” foreign team of filmmakers in North Korea, as they did not trouble the regime by looking under the surface - they were content with what they were given and asked to do. (Wikipedia)
6.4Dennis Rodman is on a mission. After forging an unlikely friendship with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, he wants to improve relations between North Korea and the US by staging a historic basketball game between the two countries. But the North Korean team isn't the only opposition he'll face... Condemned by the NBA and The Whitehouse, and hounded every step of the way by the press, can Dennis keep it together and make the game happen? Or will it go up in a mushroom cloud of smoke? For the first time, discover the true story of what happened when Dennis Rodman took a team of former-NBA players to North Korea and staged the most controversial game of basketball the world has never seen.
10.0"Djazaïrouna", produced by the cinema service of the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic (GPRA), is a montage film intended to inform the international community at the UN in 1959 on the objectives pursued by the Algerian resistance during the war of 'Algeria. Independence in Algeria (1954-1962). In 1959, Djamel-Eddine Chanderli and Mohammed Lakdar-Hamina produced Djazaïrouna (Our Algeria) from images taken by René Vautier and Doctor Pierre Chaulet. This film, completed a little later and will result in the film “The Voice of the People”. This documentary on the history of Algeria through a montage of current events, traces the political and military actions of the A.L.N, the demonstrations of December 1960, and the attack on a fortified French base on the border between Algeria and Tunisia.
0.0Irpinia follows the journey of young West Indian dreamer Dudley as he makes his way to England in the 1960s. At 24 years old, Dudley boarded a ship named Irpinia in search of a better life in England, the so-called motherland. Now 86, Dudley reflects on the exciting journey at sea and the harsh reality that lay ahead of him.
6.9North Korea. The last communist country in the world. Unknown, hermetic and fascinating. Formerly known as “The Hermit Kingdom” for its attempts to remain isolated, North Korea is one of the largest sources of instability as regards world peace. It also has the most militarized border in the world, and the flow of impartial information, both going in and out, is practically non-existent. As the recent Sony-leaks has shown, it is the perfect setting for a propaganda war.
10.0The made-for-cable documentary film The Real Eve is predicated on the theory that the human race can be traced to a common ancestor. The mitochondrial DNA of one prehistoric woman, who lived in Africa, has according to this theory been passed down from generation to generation over a span of 150,000 years, supplying the "chemical energy" to all humankind.
Korea is a divided nation. Filmmaker Min Sook Lee sets out on a revelatory, emotion-charged journey into Korea’s broken heart, exploring the rhetoric and realism of reunification through the extraordinary stories of ordinary people.
6.6Operating under a pseudonym which means 'no boundaries' - North Korean defector Sun Mu creates political pop art based on his life, homeland, and hope for a future united Korea. His hidden identity is nearly compromised when a massive historical exhibit in Beijing is shuttered by Chinese and North Korean authorities.
0.0This film travels over open books, looted objects and postcards to look for the imperial foundations of the world in which we live. Within this wide landscape the film focuses on the destruction of the Jewish Muslim world that existed in North Africa, making it imaginable and inhabitable again. Narrated in the first person, by an Algerian Jew and a Palestinian Jew, the film refuses imperial histories of those places. Objects held captive in museums and archives outside of the places from where they were looted are only the visible tip of the iceberg of the mass colonial plunder of Africa. The film explores the substantial wealth accumulated through the extraction of raw materials, labour, knowledge and skills, including the “visual wealth” attained by putting people in front of the colonisers’ cameras.
7.2Over the course of one year, this film follows the life of an ordinary Pyongyang family whose daughter was chosen to take part in Day of the Shining Star (Kim Jong-il's birthday) celebration. While North Korean government wanted a propaganda film, the director kept on filming between the scripted scenes. The ritualized explosions of color and joy contrast sharply with pale everyday reality, which is not particularly terrible, but rather quite surreal.
7.1Dear Pyongyang is a documentary film by Zainichi Korean director Yang Yong-hi (Korean: 양영희, Hanja: 梁英姬) about her own family. It was shot in Osaka Japan (Yang's hometown) and Pyongyang, North Korea, In the 1970s, Yang's father, an ardent communist and leader of the pro-North movement in Japan, sent his three sons from Japan to North Korea under a repatriation campaign sponsored by ethnic activist organisation and de facto North Korean embassy Chongryon; as the only daughter, Yang herself remained in Japan. However, as the economic situation in the North deteriorated, the brothers became increasingly dependent for survival on the care packages sent by their parents. The film shows Yang's visits to her brothers in Pyongyang, as well as conversations with her father about his ideological faith and his regrets over breaking up his family.