Special Collection

A gritty look at the camp towns surrounding U.S. military bases in South Korea. This documentary follows Yon Ja Kim, a charismatic 50-year-old former sex worker through American Town, a government subsidized entertainment district for U.S. airforce personnel. Now a missionary devoted to aiding sex workers and running a daycare center for fatherless children, Ms. Kim takes the audience on a journey ... More

Forgotten Warriors

Kim Jin Yoel

Producer: PURN Productions

2005, 99 min., Color, South Korea

A fascinating documentary about one of the little known legacies of the Korean War (1950-53), FORGOTTEN WARRIORS tells the stories of women guerilla fighters for North Korea who were captured, held for many years in South Korean jails - then released. Remaking their lives, assessing their past - and still socialist ot the core, this film profiles the characters and lives of these amazing women.

Grandmother's Flower

Jeong-hyun Mun

2008, 89 min., Color, South Korea

When director Mun accidentally discovered the diaries of his late granduncle, who was mentally ill, he unexpectedly learned about his family's secret history. The small mountain village in South Jeolla Province where Mun's family lived, was nursing the wounds from conflicts of class, ideology as well as from the displacement of family members in South and North Korea, and even in Japan. It turned ... More

Homes Apart: Korea

J.T. Takagi & Christine Choy

Producer: Third World Newsreel

1991, 56 min., Color, US/Korea

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 90's, 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 ... More

Living in Half Tones

Me-K Ahn

1994, 9 min., Color

A metaphorical reconstruction of the artist's developing identity as an adopted Korean girl in America who returns to Korea for the first time "to search for bits and pieces of my past." A visually powerful autobiographical lamentation on displacement and the search for home.

Looking For Wendy

Kimberly Saree Tomes

1998, 18 min., Color

Tomes' pseudo-search for her roots as a Korean adoptee takes her from her adoptive father who works in bio-engineering (genetically creating the world's juiciest tomato) to the adoptive relationship between Dave, the founder of Wendy's, and KFC's Colonel Sanders. This wry and ironic tape moves swiftly between pop-culture quotes and today's conventional wisdom on the relationship between genetics a ... More

Mother

Jun seek TAE

2011, 102 min., Color, South Korea

MOTHER follows labor activist Lee So-seon, who for over 40 years organized for workers’ rights in South Korea. A courageous, yet humble woman, Lee’s activism began the day her son, iconic labor activist Chun Tae-il, died in November 1970.

South Korea’s rapid industrialization under the Park Chung-hee dictatorship in the 1960s and 1970s modernized the country at the cost of workers’ li ... More

North Korea: Beyond the DMZ

J.T. Takagi & Hye Jung Park Edited by Dena Mermelstein

2003, 60 min., Color, North Korea/US

While this tiny state on the divided Korean peninsula is continually demonized in the U.S., few have any first hand knowledge of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. What is it like on the other side of the 38th parallel? How do Koreans in the North view this past decade with the fall of Soviet communism, natural disasters that brought famine and power shortages, and a continued, dangerously ... More

Repatriation

Dong-won Kim

Producer: PURN Productions

2003, 149 min., Color, South Korea

In the spring of 1992 documentary filmmaker Dong-won Kim met Cho Chang-son and Kim Seak-hyoung, two North Koreans arrested by South Korean authorities years before. Convicted of spying for the North, they were incarcerated and spent thirty years as political prisoners. These men, and many others like them, underwent conversion schemes in prison that involved torture: those who renounced their comm ... More

Sky-blue Hometown

Soh-Young Kim

2000, 93 min., Color, Korea

This documentary traces the trajectory of a Korean diasporic community in the former Soviet Union. Placed in internment camps by Stalin during World War II, the plight of a generation of Korean-Russians was documented in secret by the artist Shin Sun-nam, whose epic painting 'Requiem' has only recently been made public.

Translating Grace

Anita Lee

1996, 20 min., BW, Canada

An innovative drama that explores the unique relationship between two Korean-Canadian women. Grace, a second generation feminist academic, and Hyang-Sook, a recent immigrant from Korea. Grace is the translator for Hyang-Sook's immigration interviews and finds herself facing a moral dilemma-- is translating a lie an act of lying itself? The conflict is played out in Grace's psychic lanbdscape. In a ... More

Turmeric Border-Marks

Christina Choe

2000, 25 min., Color

TURMERIC BORDER-MARKS is an experimental documentary set in modern Seoul, Korea, where an intersection becomes two stories of migration, globalization, hybrid identity, cracked mirrors and turmeric (a yellow spice powder). A young Korean-American college student voyages back to the motherland where she meets South Asian migrant workers. These parallel stories illuminate and question our assumption ... More

Variety Survival Talkshow

Se Young JO

2009, 72 min., Color, South Korea

“I was about six. Back then I didn't know what it was or what it was called, so I couldn't tell anyone. But even after I knew what it was, I still couldn't speak out.” --KangYoung, Korean performance artist

In South Korea, only seven percent of female victims of rape or attempted rape report their case to the authorities. Through interviews, testimonies, performances and animation, this ... More

War in Daechuri

Jeong II Geon

Producer: PURN Productions

2006, 45 min., South Korea

Spurred by the US government's plan to expand military bases in Pyeongtaek city, a war is being waged against the farmers of the South Korean village of Daechuri. In this joint effort by the South Korean and US governments to grab land that these farmers worked on for decades, schools and homes were destroyed, elderly women beaten, and thousands of police surrounded the village and enclosed it wi ... More

The Women Outside: Korean Women and the U.S. Military

J.T. Takagi & Hye Jung Park

Producer: Third World Newsreel

1995, 60 min., Color, US/South Korea

Documenting the lives of women who work in the South Korean military brothels and clubs where over 27,000 women "service" the 37,000 American soldiers stationed in the most militarized region of the world, The Women Outside follows their provocative journey from the outskirts of Seoul to the inner cities of America. A testament of endurance and survival, it raises questions about U.S. military pol ... More