
18 Jan 2021

North Korea: Inside The Mind of a Dictator
A journey through Kim Jong Un’s past and present to understand the man and the myth who holds North Korea’s uncertain future in his hands.
In 1962, a U.S. soldier sent to guard the peace in South Korea deserted his unit, walked across the most heavily fortified area on earth and defected to the Cold War enemy, the communist state of North Korea. He became a star of the North Korean propaganda machine, but then disappeared from the face of the earth. Now, after 45 years, the story of James Dresnok, the last American defector in North Korea, is being told for the first time. Crossing the Line follows Dresnok as he recalls his childhood, desertion, and life in the DPRK.
Himself
Himself
Narrator
Self
Self (archive footage)
18 Jan 2021
A journey through Kim Jong Un’s past and present to understand the man and the myth who holds North Korea’s uncertain future in his hands.
19 Jun 2024
One year after the Korean War, the conflict had reached a stalemate. The two opposing forces began to search for a way to end the grueling war of attrition, eventually settling on a modest village called ‘Pan Mun Jom’ near Gaeseong as the designated site for negotiations. Despite initial hopes for a quick resolution, the negotiating parties encountered obstacles that prevented an agreement. Disputes over the military demarcation line and the repatriation of prisoners of war thwarted their efforts. The film peels back the layers to reveal the untold story of Pan Mun Jom, shedding light on a history that has remained hidden until now.
17 Sep 2023
The story revolves around an elderly farmer tending her fields on the border between the two Koreas. Living on the other side of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), she struggles to reclaim the land that was taken from her by the local government. The aged protagonist has already experienced the heartache of losing her homeland to the ravages of war. A poignant memory from seventy years ago resurfaces - during the Korean War, American soldiers suddenly entered her village. The subsequent division of the Korean peninsula and the course of development took away everything she held dear.
01 Jan 2004
If 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
27 Oct 2021
Ryun-hee Kim, a North Korean housewife, was forced to come to South Korea and became its citizen against her will. As her seven years of struggle to go back to her family in North Korea continues, the political absurdity hinders her journey back to her loved ones. The life of her family in the North goes on in emptiness, and she fears that she might become someone, like a shadow, who exists only in the fading memory of her family.
02 Jan 1991
They speak the same language, share a similar culture and once belonged to a single nation. When the Korean War ended in 1953, ten million families were torn apart. By the early 90s, as the rest of the world celebrated the end of the Cold War, Koreans remain separated between North and South, fearing the threat of mutual destruction. Beginning with one man's journey to reunite with his sister in North Korea, filmmakers Takagi and Choy reveal the personal, social and political dimensions of one of the last divided nations on earth. The film was also the first US project to get permission to film in both South & North Korea.
15 Oct 2021
In 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.
18 Jan 2009
The first film to fully expose the humanitarian crisis of North Korea, this stylish, deeply moving documentary is centered around astonishing interviews with survivors of North Korea's vast and largely hidden prison camps, and interspersed with archival footage of North Korean propoganda films and original art performances.
12 Aug 2021
True 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?
23 Oct 2023
A courageous pastor uses his underground network to rescue and aid North Korean families as they risk their lives to embrace freedom.
27 Oct 2018
Shrouded in secrecy and notoriously cash-strapped the North Korean regime has resorted to running one of the world's largest slaving operations - exploiting the profits to fulfil their own agenda. These bonded labourers can be found in Russia, China and dozens of other countries around the world including EU member states. Featuring undercover footage and powerful testimonials, we reveal the scale and brutality of the operation and ask what, if anything, is being done to stop it.
12 Jun 2013
They’ve become the human face of inhuman barbarity. Leaders like Hitler, Idi Amin Dada, Stalin, Kim Jong Il, Saddam Hussein, Nicolae Ceausescu, Bokassa, Muammar Kadhafi, Khomeini, Mussolini and Franco governed their countries completely cut off from reality. These paranoid leaders were driven to abuse their power by the pathology of power itself. Dictators are driven by a relentless, thought-out determination to impose themselves as infallible, all-knowing and all-powerful beings. But they are also men ruled by their caprices, uncontrollable impulses, and reckless fits of frenzy, which paradoxically render them as human as anyone else. The abuses they committed were clearly atrocious, yet some of them were as outlandish as the characters portrayed in the film The Dictator. They sunk to depths worthy of Kafka: so incredibly absurd, they are outrageously funny.
12 Oct 2024
The love of Kim Jong Il, the former dictator of North Korea, for cinema and his adventures, including the kidnapping of a director.
09 Sep 2021
In July 1951, all the sides to the Korean War sought a ceasefire. For a ceasefire, the Allied and Communist forces began to hold talks at Naebongjang, located northeast of Kaesong. However, they only sharply opposed each other and didn't make progress in the negotiation. In October 1951, the two sides met again in the small village of Neolmun-ri below Gaeseong. They set up tents there to negotiate and named the place Panmunjom. The name Panmunjeom is a combination word of Panmun, meaning Neulmun-ri, and “Jom,” of an inn.
04 Apr 2022
Who is Kim Yo-jong? In a context of maximum tensions between North Korea and the United States, Pierre Haski paints an unprecedented portrait of the little sister of Kim Jong-un, whose influence in Pyongyang is growing stronger day by day.
06 Feb 2018
The escalation of tensions between Pyongyang and Washington continues, plunging the world into fear of a nuclear war. Update on the geopolitical issues of this conflict.
25 Jun 2020
From 1950 to 1953, one hundred thousand children were orphaned by the Korean War. With no resources to mend the wounds, the two sides, North and South, took different paths to find homes and families for the war orphans. While the children of South Korea were sent to Europe and the United States through ‘International Adoption’, the children of North Korea were distributed across Eastern Europe through a method called ‘Commissioned Education’. As a result, more than five thousand children from the North had to spend nearly a decade living in foreign lands across Eastern Europe. This story is a record of their lives, which used to be kept hidden from the rest of the world. There is a key to understanding how North Korea's closed political structure began and how the ‘Juche ideology’ was formed in this documentary movie. Understanding North Korea in the 1950s is an important way to understand North Korea at present.
15 Dec 2020
How is it possible that North Korea, one of the poorest countries on earth finances a nuclear weapons program large enough to challenge the USA? The answer: Bureau 39, a legendary organization nestled deep inside the government apparatus. Its aim is to procure foreign exchange by any means possible to provide Kim Jong-un’s regime with money.
28 Feb 2022
It’s October 10 2020 and Kim Jong-un presents the largest mobile rocket on Earth. Jippe Liefbroer, Interaction Design student, sees the rocket and thinks: it can be bigger. For his graduation project he built 'Kimmi's worst nightmare', a 31 meter long rocket. That is 1 meter longer than Kim Jung-un's.
11 Jun 2020
A contemporary history of Korea(s) from a unique point of view that embraces the inner history of both South and North Korea in a single narrative.