My brothers and sisters in the north

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Movie
Original title My brothers and sisters in the north
Country of production Germany
original language Korean , German , with German subtitles
Publishing year 2016
length Cinema: 106 minutes
TV: 90 minutes
Age rating FSK 0
Rod
Director Sung-Hyung Cho
script Sung-Hyung Cho
production Andreas Banz
Dirk Engelhardt
music Peyman Yazdanian
camera Thomas Schneider
Julia Daschner
cut Fabian Oberhem

My Brothers and Sisters in the North (in the TV version My Brothers and Sisters in North Korea ) is a 106 minute long documentary by the German - South Korean director Sung-Hyung Cho . The world premiere took place on March 29, 2016 as the opening film of the Lichter Filmfest .

content

The film tries to show everyday life in North Korea using several life descriptions . The director interviewed several people whose everyday lives are as different as possible:

Your interview partners were not purely chance acquaintances, as a number of people were selected by the state authorities for the documentation. However, the director still had the opportunity to choose her interview partner within a narrow framework.

After she had difficulties filming in North Korea as a South Korean, Sung-Hyung Cho renounced her Korean citizenship and only kept her German citizenship . After a few setbacks, it was possible to win Hessischer Rundfunk as a co-production partner and to establish contacts with the responsible people in North Korea - on the condition that they did not shoot a family drama . To prepare for the film, she traveled to North Korea several times and talked to her interviewees.

Sung-Hyung Cho refrained from commenting on the film scenes " off-screen " and instead asked her interview partners what appeared to be naive questions. For example, why the female bathers in a water park do not wear bikinis - and received the answer that this does not correspond to the customs of the country and is forbidden.

Awards

My brothers and sisters in the north received the award for best regional feature film at the 9th Lights Film Festival . The jury judged that Sung-Hyung Cho exploited the possibilities given by the system “in a clever and respectful way”. In the interviews, she asked very definitely, but still gave the protagonist space, which resulted in “a mosaic-like portrait of a torn country”. The viewer will be able to “look behind the pictures, read between the lines and adopt their own attitude”.

At the 26th Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania Film Festival , My Brothers and Sisters in the North was voted the best documentary film (together with Parchim International ). The jury justified its choice, among other things, with the fact that Sung-Hyung Cho succeeded, despite the framework set by the North Korean government, "through a special mixture of warmth and distance [...] to bring the lifestyle of different generations very vividly closer in their interviews ".

background

My Brothers and Sisters in the North is a co-production by Kundschafter Filmproduktion GmbH Berlin with the Hessian and West German broadcasts . The editors were Esther Schapira from HR and Jutta Krug from WDR. The film was released in German cinemas on July 14, 2016.

The first broadcast on the first took place on July 26, 2017.

criticism

After the film was broadcast on ARD, the publicist Henryk M. Broder published a sharp criticism of the film in the daily Die Welt on July 29, 2017. The film is propaganda at its best. He refers to misrepresentations in the film (General Kim Il-sung was born in 1942 and not in 1912), which are not corrected by the speaker. All in all, the film goes from one Potemkin village to another. Classrooms that look as if they were only occupied an hour ago are shown completely uncritically. Elsewhere, as if by chance, the protagonist passes a tractor driver who is currently replacing a tire and is wearing a crisp white T-shirt. The workers in a clothing factory flock to work in elegant dresses and costumes, which in turn is neither commented on nor questioned.

Broder sees a historical example of such propaganda films in the Nazi film Der Fuehrer gives the Jews a city through the Theresienstadt concentration camp . While the first subjected this film to an extensive fact check in a recently broadcast anti-Semitism documentary and corrected not only facts but also views, this was not considered necessary in the case of this film in praise of North Korean communism.

Others, however, praised the way the film was made. The Tagesspiegel wrote that the film "[undermine] the propaganda, (...) by carefully putting the arranged encounters into the picture, patiently looking at their surface until it reveals its own truth." The director herself said in an interview with Spiegel Online about the propaganda remarks left uncommented in the film: “Do you think that the audience is so stupid that they don't notice? It's so presumptuous and underestimates the people in front of the TV. They are able to read between the lines. You don't have to have everything dictated, you can also think for yourself. "

swell

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Program information from ARD , accessed on July 27, 2017.
  2. ↑ Program overview 2016. (No longer available online.) In: Lichter Filmfest . Archived from the original on August 8, 2016 ; accessed on August 8, 2016 .
  3. ↑ a b Vanessa Steinmetz: North Korea documentary: "Do you think that viewers are so stupid?" In: Spiegel Online . August 1, 2017, accessed June 10, 2018 .
  4. ^ Prize Winner Lights 2016 ( Memento from August 13, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) lichter-filmfest.de, accessed on August 13, 2016.
  5. ^ The prices of the 26th FILMKUNSTFEST Mecklenburg-Vorpommern ( Memento from August 13, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) filmland-mv.de, accessed on August 13, 2016.
  6. ↑ My Brothers and Sisters in the North, farbfilm verleih GmbH, accessed on August 13, 2016.
  7. ^ Henryk M. Broder: Strange ARD documentary: North Korean propaganda at its best - in the first. In: Welt Online . July 29, 2017. Retrieved August 27, 2017 .
  8. ↑ http://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/die-doku-meine-brueder-und-schwestern-im-norden-das-kollektiv-tanzt/13871020.html