Dark Beginnings

In 1992, political prisoners from North Korea settled in the South Korean town where filmmaker Dong-won Kim lived. Sent to South Korea as spies during the war, they spent 30 years in jail. How did they endure the many years of torture? What will become of them now that they have been released? Twelve years in the making, Repatriation is a very personal view of a country divided by an ongoing cold war.

An exchange of filmed correspondence between three documentarists, respectively Indonesian, Serbian and South Korean. Attentive to cultures other than their own, each films zones with blurred or shifting borders.

The film opens with the words of Taebaek's last miners: "I had to earn a living." These are the first words, spoken over the shot of a cage descending endlessly into a mine—the place that the miners of the soon-to-be-closed Jangseong Mining Station call hell. They began working out of poverty, needing to make a living somehow. Though they planned to quit after three days, they ended up staying for over 30 years, and in all that time, they saw nothing good.

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 out that the history of his family contained all the tragedies of modern Korean history, a history he had only known through textbooks. This interesting documentary investigates a complex history linking the repercussions of Japanese colonialism and the Korean War to the director's family memories.

On the road of horses that erased horses, I remember the time of the horses. Use the horse's ears and mouth to feel it. Blurry but wide vision, distant and near passing conversations.

Eunbin, charged with protesting at the headquarters of a coal-fired power plant exporter, embarks on a legal battle that becomes a platform to expose the urgency of the climate crisis. In court, she shares firsthand accounts of climate disaster survivors. Her journey takes us to small towns and rural areas ravaged by these disasters, revealing communities fighting to protect their lives through care and solidarity in the face of climate catastrophe. Along the way, an unexpected alliance forms between young Eunbin and an elderly activist whom she met during a coal plant protest. As the fierce battle against climate change continues, Eunbin's case reaches its climax with a Supreme Court verdict.