When I received an invitation from the Korea Society in New York to
attend a 4-part screening of North Korean films, I jumped at the
opportunity for multiple reasons. To begin with, I am a huge fan of
Korean movies, admittedly those that come from the south exclusively. As
a relic of the cold war, North Korean movies–like Cuban cigars–are hard
to come by. I assumed that they would be much different than the deeply
ironic and alienated South Korean movies that I had become devoted to,
but was curious to see whether the national culture that had been
developing for millennia could still be detected in the dogmatically
Marxist north.
While many of the finest South Korean movies are unavailable on home
video, you can rent “Save the Green Planet” from Netflix, which
summarizes the movie thusly:
"Believing that aliens in human form are systematically destroying the
planet and all humankind, Byung-gu sets out to capture an alien leader
and force him to confess. Because all the aliens look like humans,
Byung-gu makes an educated guess and kidnaps the head of a chemical
company."
Now, how can you resist such a movie!
I also wondered if North Korean movies would give me insights into one
of the two remaining socialist countries in the world, giving the word
socialist its broadest interpretation of course. As a long time
supporter of the Cuban revolution, my attitude toward North Korea was
probably like most leftists. We did not want to see North Korea
victimized by economic sanctions or military attack, but there was
little to identify with in a society that was bound together by an odd
combination of 1930s style Stalinism and centuries old Confucian beliefs.
full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2009/06/03/north-korean-movies/
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