Diaspora: Arirang Road(2019)

Arada(de)

The story of three Turkish men. They all grew up in Switzerland and all got deported after various criminal offenses.

Ryeohaeng(ko)

A 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.

Blue Butterfly Effect(ko)

The small county of Seongju staged protests against the THAAD. Young mothers led protests from concerns about their kids and the exposure to radiation. Gradually, they learn the system is faulty.

My Love, Don't Cross That River(ko)

There lives a couple known as "100-year-old lovebirds". They're like fairy tale characters: the husband is strong like a woodman, and the wife is full of charms like a princess. They dearly love each other, wear Korean traditional clothes together, and still fall asleep hand in hand. However, death, quietly and like a thief, sits between them. This film starts from that moment, and follows the last moments of 76 years of their marriage.

Don't Cry for Me Sudan(ko)

A Schweitzer of Korea Father LEE Tae-seok, devoted his life in Sudan; a remote area of Africa.

Cuban Rafters(es)

The 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.

Project Cheonan Ship(ko)

Interpreting 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.

Twinsters(en)

Adopted from South Korea, raised on different continents & connected through social media, Samantha & Anaïs believe that they are twin sisters separated at birth.

Diving Women of Jeju-do(ko)

Jeju-do is the largest of Korean islands and lies between Korea and Japan. There, for hundreds of years, women dive without breathing apparatus, to the ocean floor and collect shellfish, octopus, and urchins that they sell. The divers are in their sixties and seventies and their daughters do not want to inherit their work, lifestyle, and health problems that go with diving. As a filmmaker I was privileged to meet many of these women and dive with them. Their stories of hardship and pride confirmed my desire to record this unique and ancient tradition.

Eastern Memories(fi)

At the turn of the 19th and 20th century Finnish philologist G. J. Ramstedt travelled around Mongolia and Central-Asia. In this documentary Ramstedt’s memoirs are heard in the modern day setting, where tradition is replaced with hunger for money, and deserts give way to cities.

Our Algeria(ar)

"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.

Landscape of our Body(vi)

As queer trans and gender non-conforming children of the Vietnamese diaspora, we are fragmented at the crossroads of being displaced from not only a sense of belonging to our ancestral land, but also our own bodies which are conditioned by society to stray away from our most authentic existence. Yet these bodies of ours are the vessels we sail to embark on a lifetime voyage of return to our original selves. It is our bodies that navigate the treacherous tides of normative systems that impose themselves on our very being. And it is our bodies that act as community lighthouses for collective liberation. Ultimately, the landscape of our bodies is our blueprint to remembering, to healing, to blooming.

Irpinia(en)

Irpinia 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.

Community of Parting(da)

Goodbye My Love, NK(ko)

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.

The Real Eve(en)

The 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.

American Herro(en)

American Herro is the remarkable story of a young Kurdish girl who comes to America as a refugee from Iraq and lives out the American dream. 30-years later, traveling the globe working for Condoleeza Rice, U.S. Diplomat Herro Mustafa invites her first American friend, filmmaker Kirk Roos, to visit Iraq and retrace her steps to freedom.

Gravity of the Tea(ko)

IM Kwon-taek is a Korean film-maker. He was born in 1934 when his country was under Japanese occupation. When Korean War was over his parents became North Korean partisan, and he ran away from home. He’s made 101 films since he made his debut in 1962 with Farewell Doman River. He tasted the glory at Cannes Int’l Film Festival with Chiwhasun. However making the 102nd film seems harder than ever to this 80-year-old director. His 2 projects have been suspended. He still can’t find chance to make his 102nd film, but spends daily routine free from film-making. This is a recording of years that the film-maker spends without making a film.

First Person Plural(en)

In 1966, Deann Borshay Liem was adopted by an American family and sent from Korea to her new home in California. There, the memory of her birth family was nearly obliterated, until recurring dreams led her to investigate her own past, and she discovered that her Korean mother was very much alive. Bravely uniting her biological and adoptive families, Borshay Liem embarks on a heartfelt journey in this acclaimed film that first premiered on POV in 2000. First Person Plural is a poignant essay on family, loss and the reconciling of two identities.

The world like a jewel in the hand: unlearning imperial plunder ii(en)

This 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.