My Sweet Baby

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.

In 2000, in the era of inter-Korean reconciliation, 63 non-converted prisoners were repatriated to the North, and a 2nd repatriation movement was launched in 2001 but failed again and again in later years. As of 2022, the average age of the surviving secondary repatriation applicants is 91.

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.