Tag: North Korea

North Korean Partisan In South Korea (Nambugun)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Based on the Korean War memoirs of Lee Tae (Ahn Sung-ki), a former North Korean news agency correspondent who fought for the North Korean partisans, this is a long and gruelling account of the Korean War, a South Korean production exploring a North Korean perspective. We rarely see inside the ranks of the South Korean forces. The partisans are all ‘comrades’ and women as well as men number among their ranks.

Inevitably, romantic attachments occur, although these are frowned upon and quickly quashed by superior officers. Which leaves separated parties desperate for news of their transferred objects of affection.

One particularly arresting sequence has Northern partisans shooting at Southern soldiers across an area of farmland until a child, seemingly oblivious to the very concept of warfare, wanders into the crossfire area. Both sides halt their shooting and come to a recognition of the humanity of the other. And that they both want the same thing: a unified Korea. Then the horrified farmer’s wife wanders into the area to rescue the child.

Elsewhere, though, the enemy is more distant: shooters to avoid and targets to hit. There are disturbing hints that Communism is an ideology to be blindly followed rather than seriously discussed. Perhaps this reflects something of the totalitarian nature of what North Korea later became as well as a South Korean perspective on the situation – very different from a more Western view of ideologically motivated conflicts elsewhere, such as the revolutionary Spanish Civil War soldiers’ left wing debates in Land And Freedom (Ken Loach, 1995).

Much of the film takes place in extremely bleak, Korean winter conditions. Cold and starvation are never far away. One character has an infected leg turn black from the knee downwards. It must be amputated – and all that’s to hand is an axe. That done, it leaves the man in question unable to travel on with his fellow partisans. Should he surrender? Should he commit suicide rather than falling into enemy hands?

Despite its well over two hours running length, this never outstays its welcome. It conveys a real sense of what warfare must have been like in the mountainous Korean terrain and as such makes for compelling viewing. It was made at a time when South Korea was lurching uneasily towards democracy following the mass protests of 1987: its attempt to get inside the heads of North Korean fighters would probably not have been condoned some five years previously. The earlier Piagol (Lee Kang-cheon, 1955), also in this year’s LKFF, apparently takes a far more anti-Communist stance in its depiction of North Korean partisans.

North Korean Partisan In South Korea plays as part of a strand showcasing director Chung Ji-Young at the 2023 London East Asia Film Festival (LEAFF) which runs from Wednesday, October 18th to Sunday, October 29th. Showing on Friday, October 20th, 20:00, at the Odeon Luxe West End, Screen 2; you can buy tickets here. Watch the strand trailer below:

In 2019, it played in the London Korean Film Festival.

House Of Hummingbird (Beol-Sae)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Seoul, South Korea, 1994. Less than 10 years since South Korea has become a democracy. The year of the Winter Olympics, the death of North Korean leader Kim Il-sung and the Seongsu Bridge collapse. The latter incident will leave its mark on some of the characters here.

Teenager Eun-hee’s mum and dad (Jung In-gi and Lee Seung-yeon) run a small food store, sourcing “only the finest ingredients”. On occasion, they deliver to other suppliers and the whole family is roped in to make sure the orders are prepped and sent out on time. They are fiercely proud parents who want only the best for their kids. The best, as they understand it, is doing well in the school and university system, presumably with the idea of getting a well paid job afterwards.

This message is reinforced by her school. A male teacher has the girls chant, ” I will go to / Seoul National University / instead of karaoke”. He also gets his class to nominate the top two delinquents among them, defined as those who smoke or date instead of studying. Eun-hee is the top nominee. Or, as two of her classmates with a clear sense of privilege put it when talking about her, “dumb girls like that don’t make it to college and they become our maids”

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Her brother Dae-hoon (Son Sang-yeon) is achieving good grades at school and looks set to go to university. He has a nasty side too: he periodically bullies and hits Eun-hee, making her home life a misery. Her sister Soo-hee (Park Soo-yeon) is out a lot and looks less devoted to academic work, on one occasion hiding in a cupboard to avoid their father.

Eun-hee herself (Park Ji-hoo) is an outsider who doesn’t really fit in at school. She likes to draw and wants to b a comic artist.

She has a boyfriend of sorts, schoolboy Kim Ji-wan (Jeong Yun-seo) who she tentatively gets to kiss her who is later dragged from her presence by his overbearing mother. A later same-sex romance with the shy Bae Yu-ri (Seol Hye-in) comes to nothing.

A lump under one ear will later cause her to be hospitalised.

Her parents send her to the local Chinese cram school, but that doesn’t motivate her academically until her teacher is replaced by university student Miss Kim Young-ji (Kim Sae-byuk), first seen smoking a cool cigarette on the school stairwell, who gets both Eun-hee and Calvin Klein clothing-obsessed fellow student Jeon Ji-suk (Park Seo-yun) to talk about themselves and their interests, the only person in the film to do so.

When the two students go shoplifting and get caught, Ji-suk reveals Eun-hee’s father’s name to the understandably incensed owner. It is Miss Young-ji to whom Eun-hee talks about the crime and in whom she subsequently confides, the one person in the film who brings her out of herself and gives her good advice, e.g. to stick up for herself when her brother beats her. Consequently, they become friends. And Eun-hee becomes vaguely aware, through titles on Miss Young-ji’s classroom bookshelf, of politics and such schools of thought as feminism.

It’s a bleak period picture of an emerging democracy where almost everyone seems to be focused on career at the expense of relationships or family. At the same time, though, it’s highly affecting as a sympathetic portrait of a teenage girl’s life which also exhibits an optimistic undercurrent in the character of a teacher who goes against the grain and shows a genuine interest in her pupils.

House Of Hummingbird plays in the BFI London Film Festival and the London East Asia Film Festival (LEAFF). Watch the film trailer below:

The Journals Of Musan (Musanilgi)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Jeon Seung-chul (writer-director Park Jung-bum) is a defector from Musan, North Korea trying to survive in the social underbelly of Seoul, South Korea. He has a badly paid makeshift job putting up fly-posters, operating on the fringes of the law. He dresses cheaply and is in need of a haircut.

He lives in the apartment of Kyung-chul (Jin Yon-guk), who occasionally brings women back for sex. His landlord has no scruples about shoplifting and also runs a lucrative scam in which other North Koreans give him money to send to North Korea.

Seung-chul reads his Bible in his room while listening to Christian worship music. He puts up with his flatmate’s pickups but draws the line when Kyung-chul takes him to a department store and steals a pair of trousers which Seung-chul wants. Seung-chul returns the pilfered item. He later alienates Kyung-chul by bringing a stray puppy home.

He attends a medium-sized Christian church on Sundays complete with pastor, robed choir and free after service meals. But he doesn’t know anyone there. The church fails the Biblical admonition that believers should welcome strangers into their midst because no-one there ever sits with Seung-chul or talks to him.

He likes a girl in the choir Young-sook (Kang Eun-jin) but she hasn’t noticed him and he can’t bring himself to talk to her. Stalking her, he learns she works running a sleazy karaoke bar where there’s a job vacancy. The twin prospect of more work and getting to know Young-sook better propel him to apply for and get the job.

The one person who appear to genuinely have Seung-chul’s best interests at heart is a cop, Detective Park (Park Young-dong), who tries to help him find better paying and more secure work. But it’s hard because Seung-chul’s ID number identities him as North Korean so no-one wants to employ him.

Shot in highly effective, long takes that really make you feel like you’re in its protagonist’s shoes, this is a slow yet compelling piece that really gets under your skin and marks out its director/ writer/ actor as a unique and articulate voice.

The film portrays a precarious existence. Various elements in Seung-chul’s insecure way of living threaten to collapse around him one by one. His fly-posting boss (Seo Jin-won) thinks his work is substandard and two thugs repeatedly beat him up for working on their turf. He falls foul of Young-sook when she finds him karaokeing to Christian choruses with the club hostesses. Then Kyung-chul’s scam unravels and the two men find themselves relentlessly pursued by three North Koreans he’s defrauded.

Made on a shoestring and breaking numerous conventions, this extraordinary independent movie is like a breath of fresh air. That’s perhaps because first-time director Park is working out how to shoot a feature as he goes along. Although things happen later on which to some extent redeem the way society and church characters here deal with the underclass, this is a searing indictment of their attitudes to some of Korea’s most vulnerable people.

Park’s second feature, the three hour long Alive (2014), plays in the LKFF on Tuesday. If it’s anywhere like as good as this debut, audiences are in for a treat.

The Journals Of Musan plays in the London Korean Film Festival (LKFF). Watch the film trailer below:

And here’s the trailer(Korean, no subtitles) for his follow up film Alive – showing in the LKFF Tuesday, November 13th:

Tickets here.

Liberation Day

Posted on by victorfraga

Not very often you will come across a combination as dirty and explosive. Firstly, think of the Slovenian band Laibach, who have always loved controversy: their name is German for their country’s capital Ljubljana, a very unwelcome gesture in Tito’s Yugoslavia (where the act was formed back in 1980); plus they’ve constantly made provocative usage of Nazi symbols and so on. Now place such band in the most secretive and possibly most oppressive regime in the world: North Korea. What’s the outcome? Perhaps something very different from what you would expect.

Laibach and North Korea have something in common: they both claim that they are highly misjudged and misunderstood, and that most of the world does not grasp their real intentions. They are the alleged misfits of the political and of the music world, and so they decided to officialise a very bizarre marriage through a singular event: Laibach performed two concerts in August 2015 at Kim Won Gyun Musical Conservatory in Nampo-dong, Pyongyang, to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the end of Japanese colonial rule in Korea. This was a first time in history a foreign band performed on North Korean soil. While you may not agree with the good intentions of the heady European band and the obscure Asian country, few would challenge that they indeed perceive themselves as the misconceived underdogs just waiting for the right opportunity to shine.

Directed by the Latvian filmmaker Uģis Olte and Norwegian Morten Traavik (who is also in front of the cameras most of the time acting as some sort of narrator, moderator and peace broker) and filmed in the days preceding the concerts, finally culminating in the event itself, Liberation Day couldn’t get any more bizarre. And yet it works extremely well. While not stated in the movie, it is obvious that the helmers could only film in locations picked by the strict regime, and I have little doubt that politicians also inspected the final footage in minute detail. Despite the censorship, the film offers an extremely interesting insight into the world’s most closed country.

Laibach also had to adapt their repertoire, and their setlist was absolutely dirtytlicious. They offered the perplexed crowd of North Koreans a medley of songs from The Sound of Music (Robert Wise, 1965), a movie very well known in the country. Of course this isn’t your jolly and gay Julie Andrews rendition, but instead a performance infested with heavy drumming, industrial flavours and a deep voice singing in German – very much the antithesis of the original musical. There are also bits of Opus’s Live is Life and We Will Go to Mount Paektu (a song in praise of Kim Jong-un) mashed into the whole ordeal.

The imagery within the movie is beautifully constructed, with elements of Soviet/ North Korean propaganda iconography blended with the idyllic hills of Austria (from the 1965 movie). And the performance at the end is priceless in both its campness and awkwardness. Think of the most bizarre act you’ve ever seen on Eurovision, and you’re not even halfway there.

From a moral perspective, is the making of such film questionable? Yes. Did the directors and the band collaborative with an oppressive regime which willfully conceals extreme poverty from the rest of the world? Yes. On the other hand, this is also a subversion of a regime which does not embrace change, a challenge of censorship and a singular opportunity for two very different worlds to establish to communicate channel, however limited it may be.

There is an unintentional reminder of the oppressive ways of the North Korean regime in the film. The American student Otto Warmbier, who was arrested in North Korea for a stealing a propaganda poster from his hotel room, is shortly featured in the movie. He died in April this year (after Liberation Day was already finished), shortly after being returned to the US. The reason of his death is likely related to mishandling while at prison and forced labour camps.

Liberation Day is showing this week at DokuFest, one of the largest documentary film festivals in Europe, which is taking place in Kosovo right now. The location of the screening isn’t insignificant at all: Kosovo and Slovenia were both part of Yugoslavia when Laibach was created 37 years ago!