Documentary
It is year 2011 and the government still talks of economic growth through medical care under the table. In reality, common people cannot afford to go to a hospital. They are nothing but extra casts in a promotional film for showing. The reality is a white jungle where medical…


Self (archive footage)

Self (archive footage)
Nearly 250,000 South Korean children were adopted to the West as “orphans” in the 60 years following the Korean War. Some to loving homes. Others to tragic ends. Raised in places where they looked like nobody else, many were told to forget their past and be grateful. But the innate desire to understand where you came from has led many Korean adoptees to search for their roots. In the process, they discover lies in their past and families they never knew existed. In this documentary series, correspondent Wei Du travels around the world to meet Korean adoptees and accompany a few on their journey to reclaim who they are. Together, they reveal how an “orphan rescue” mission separated families and erased the roots of hundreds of thousands.

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.

German filmmaker Susanne, married to a Korean man named Kim Jeong Rae, turns the camera toward her own intercultural marriage and family with both humor and tenderness. Blending vérité and performance, the film dives into the beautiful mess of love, identity, and cultural collision. Becoming Kim asks: How do we stay true to ourselves—while learning to love another?

Crossroads explores the ever changing face of South Korea since the Sewol ferry disaster that tragically killed 304 people, mainly schoolchildren, in April 2014. The film takes us on a journey through Korean modern history exploring the changes the country has gone through since April 16th 2014, encompassing emotional re-enactment narrations from survivors, interviews with family members, activists, historians and the general public, as we go in search of how Korea came to yet another crossroad in its history.

A cafe is growing, tucked in to the mountainside air raid shelter of the DMZ borderlands. A light light flickers, illuminating the past, present, and future. I'll see you at the DMZ! Shim was a free, one-day pop-up cafe staged in Yangji-ri village’s air raid shelter at the Korean DMZ. Referencing Korean cafe culture’s fixation on third place, the DMZ’s evolution from security tourism, to ecological peace tourism, and its repurposing as art production site, Shim attempts to intervene and align the past and present. Yangji-ri was one of many minbuk propaganda villages established by the Park Chung Hee regime in the 1960s to showcase the farming bounty and prosperity of the south for a North Korean gaze. The village was formerly part of the Civilian Control Line (CCL) until 2013 when it was reterritorialized as a normal part of South Korea.

The film traces the career of some of the winners of this new generation nicknamed the "K-Classics Generation", including the 2 recent winners of the Queen Elisabeth Competition, the soprano Hwang Sumi and the violinist Lim Jiyoung. In Korea, where it all began, and in Germany where most of them have settled.