Directing
Interweaving footage from the director’s three visits to North Korea with songs, spectacle, popular cinema and archival footage, Songs from the North takes a different look at this enigmatic country typically seen through the distorted lens of jingoistic propaganda and derisive satire. Challenging the meaning of freedom, love, patriotism and ultimately the human condition, it tries to understand, on their own terms, the psychology and popular imaginary of the North Korean people and the political ideology of absolute love which continues to drive the nation towards its uncertain future.
Taking inspiration from the collaborative 1967 militant anthology film Far from Vietnam, five of the boldest and most prominent American militant filmmakers unite to create this searing (and seething) omnibus work, employing a variety of approaches to reveal the hidden costs of the United States' (and Canada's) most expensive and longest-running war. (TIFF)
An investigation into the military involvement of South Korea in the Vietnam War is as much digging as exorcism.
Dangerous Supplement is an incomplete index for the memory, a substitute for a vision that is yet to be born.' The film begins with a damaged landscape, an invisible landscape. All the images/places are metaphorically flawed or incomplete, being lost as fast as you can see them. They tip heavenwards or they fall to earth. (Mark LaPore)
