Coming to theatres tomorrow, Friday, September 18: SONGS FROM THE NORTH
Soon-Mi Yoo’s exploration of North Korea made its debut last year at Locarno, where it won the award for best debut feature. Since then it has screened at Rio, Vienna, Cairo, Gothenburg, BAFICI, Vilnius, and NYC’s Migrating Forms, among others.
Taking a free-flowing, essayistic approach, Yoo’s film eschews a traditional narrative trajectory to instead offer a more impressionistic view of the ever-captivating enigma of the closed-off Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and of the South Korean filmmaker’s conflicted relationship to the nation. Combining footage shot during several trips, an interview with her father that serves as the film’s strongest through line, clips of various state-sponsored celebrations, selections from popular North Korean cinema, and occasional introspective title cards, Yoo forms an at times mesmerizing vision of the country that is at the same time strangely commonplace and located within some bizarre parallel universe.
what (not) to doc 