Foreign Sky
Soni KUM
- Japan
- 2005
- 70min
- 15 +
- DCP
- color
KP
Synopsis
Filmmaker is a third generation Korean who grew up in a North Korean community in Japan. Today, 152,900 North Korean refugees live in Japan as a result of Japanese colonialism. The story of the North Korean community is told by tracing her memory and her family history. With found footage rarely seen outside the North Korean community, the filmmaker weaves her personal diaries, letters from relatives living in North Korea with poetic images of her own to create an alternate fictional narrative. A narrative that is usually associated with terrorism and the other side of Machiavellian principles of good vs. evil.
Review
Foreign Sky is a documentary film Soni Kum created while she was a student at the California Institute of the Arts, covering the same topic as Beast of Me, but showing various experiments for a longer running time. The film delves into the history of Zainichi Koreans affiliated with Chongryon, which has been deleted from the official history of nation states such as Japan, the United States, South Korea, and North Korea, as well as their own stories which have been silenced in the history of their community, and the gaps in between. The film asks the audience to look at the lives that have been slipped, silenced, and vanished amidst the violence of history through the footages and narrations of various documentaries and feature films. In particular, the scene from Nagisa Oshima's 1968 film Death by Hanging, subversively brings to the surface the female body, which has been otherized in the narratives of Zainichi Koreans, and captures the clashes between history and reenactment, body and emotion.
Director
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Soni KUM
Soni Kum is a multimedia artist who works in film and video, installation, performance. Her work has been featured in art spaces and film festivals around the world such as Japan, Korea, Brazil, Germany and UK.