The members of the Korean K-Pop group “9 Muses” dream of becoming global stars. To achieve this, the young women are willing to make sacrifices and suffer humiliations galore.
Along with Japanese war criminals and despite Korean protests, Koreans who were forcibly recruited by Japan in the Second World War are revered at the Yasukun Shrine as national heroes of the former enemy.
Nike, Samsung, H&M. Call centres, supermarkets, online shops. An ode to the women who produce what we consume, not just in Korea. Experimental, documentary, distressing.
Of course the daughter can’t forgive her father for leaving her and her mother for another woman. The memory is painful. A reunion opens old wounds.
Even though she grew up in a well-to-do family in Pyongyang, she ended up in one of the notorious labour camps, where many of her relatives die, without ever learning the reasons. A depressing film about the despotism of the North Korean regime.
Korean Women were captured and brought to Java island as comfort women for soldiers. They lived on camp, always in fear of the men, illness or death. Chung Seo-woon, one of the victims tells her story of her survival.
“Udumbara” is the name of the Buddhist jazz band the monk Hyegwang founded with two friends from his days as a rock musician in the 1970s. At the time they toured the night clubs of Busan and were celebrated like stars, today they play in the streets.
The term “manshin” refers to a shaman in trance, communicating between the living and the dead. South Korea’s best-known shaman, Kim Keum-hwa, was initiated into the art of exorcising, the so-called “gut”, by her grandmother.
Film producer and director Kimjho Gwang-soo, openly gay, announces that he and his life partner Dave Kim are going to marry.
The director’s father, who never learned to use a computer when he was alive, leaves her an autobiography written in 43 e-mails: his views on a restless life
A couple who have been married for 76 years live in a remote valley. Isolated from modern Korea they collect wood, keep their yard clean and do their daily chores, all the while cooing like young lovers, holding hands or putting flowers behind their ears.
Visually disabled Yong-gwang crafts a tactile map to take a walk with his sister, who is in the hospital. He makes her close her eyes and they take an imaginary walk on the map and through Yong-gwang's way of looking at the world.
Even the end of romance can be poetic! The chaos in a woman’s heart is compared to the search for suitable feelings in a corner shop.
In the course of the radical renovation of Seoul enforced by the conservative government, organically grown neighbourhoods were demolished by the dozen, their tenant communities torn apart.
