“Actually, and this is absolutely true, me and Sun met the first time at a road side rest stop between Pyongyang and DMZ (The Korean Demilitarised Zone),” Norwegian director Morten Traavik describes his highly unlikely first encounter with Sun Kim, his co-director on North South Man Woman (a world premiere in international competition at Sheffield DocFest).
This chance meeting in a lay-by in North Korea happened in 2012. Traavik had been organising a festival of Norwegian culture in North Korea. He started speaking to Kim, noticing she was fluent in English.
“I was there with a group of Columbia University graduate students from the school of international relations,” Brussels-based Kim remembers. She is US-born but grew up in South Korea and is also fluent in Korean.
After that first meeting, the duo kept on bumping into each other. They also started to collaborate. For instance, Kim appeared in Traavik’s earlier doc Liberation Day (2016) which followed fiery Balkan rock band Laibach as it gives a concert in Pyongyang,
“We already had established a creative partnership and we had quite a lot of experience of working together,” Traavik points out. When he read a newspaper article in 2018 about matchmaking between North Korean refugee women and South Korean men, he was immediately fascinated. He already had strong connections with both the Koreas (although he has spent more time in the North than in the South).
Nonetheless, the Norwegian knew he needed help if he was to attempt a documentary on the subject. “Being very much of an outsider linguistically, culturally, I needed somebody who could be the bridge to the subject of the film; someone not only bilingual but with a built-in cultural understanding of both worlds,” he explains why he turned again to Kim.
The new film is mainly funded by the Norwegian Film Institute and sold by Dogwoof. It looks in depth at the romantic but sometimes vexed relationships between North Korean women who’ve left their homeland and South Korean men.
One of the main protagonists is Yujin Han, a fiercely entrepreneurial North Korean married to a laidback husband. She runs several businesses including matchmaking agency Lovestorya, which brings together North and South Korean couples.
Yujin also has a company that manufactures bean paste. Kim rhapsodies about the “strong, earthy” taste of the different brands of the food which has the soy sauce left in and is fermented for several years in containers. The director has given samples to friends in Europe who run Korean restaurants and most have been “really excited about it.”
The film has been fermenting for almost as long as the bean paste. It has been an epic six-year journey to complete it – albeit with an interruption of two years because of the pandemic.
When Kim first met Yujin in late 2018, she was immediately struck by her openness. Many North Korean women trying to build new lives in the South “can be very private, want to hide and not really come up to the surface but she [Yujin] really understood the longer term vision of this,” she says. “The idea was that we wanted to show a different side of North Koreans, that it wasn’t just a gameshow or a show to pick their brains about all the torture they had gone through, or the escape they had gone through. That part has been talked about a lot, but this is about finding more about their human side, finding out more about how they fall in love.”
In the documentary, there is an obvious contrast between the North Korean women, who are motivated, hard-working and extraordinarily resourceful, and the South Korean men, who can seem laidback and sometimes even a little feckless.
“That journey that you make between North Korea and South Korea, if you have the resilience, the persistence and the ability to make that journey and land in South Korea, there is nothing you can’t do once you arrive,” Kim sums up the can-do attitude of the film’s female protagonists. They’ve already endured such adversity that dating a South Korean man and starting a family seems pretty straightforward.
“North Korean women, once they arrive [in the south], they work their asses off and they are able to buy a house in four to five years. They are just really, really hard-working…it’s true that their spouses may seem a little bit less motivated,” the director notes. She adds, though, that it’s not just a case of the South Korean men being lazy. They tend to have different ideas about the life-work balance.
The documentary includes footage of a famous North Korean romcom, ‘Urban Girl Comes To Get Married’ (1993), about a fashion designer from Pyongyang who comes to a small rural village and is courted by a local duck farmer. “This is probably one of the most well-known and beloved films in the North,” Traavik says. “As you may imagine, every artistic output in the North that is not for exclusively decorative purposes has some element of propaganda to it….this film also has that element but in a quite mild way. It does feature more on the romantic intrigue.”
At certain points, North South Man Woman may look like a classic piece of fly on the wall verité cinema, but Traavik points out that everything was actually planned well in advance. “The constant challenge was to pin down Yujin in her incessant empire building,” he jokes about the entrepreneurial protagonist who is continually coming up with yet more business schemes.
Another of the North Korean women, Hyoju Han, shares a devastating eight-minute “confessional” in which she gives details of how she eventually made her way to South Korea via China – and of the extreme suffering and bereavement she endured en route. This was her first interview, on the first day of shooting, and it was all shot in one take. “She just sat down on the chair and told this story.”
Hyoju and the other women felt that the filmmakers “were kind of passing through” and therefore that it was safe to share intimate personal stories with them. “There was this need to unload,” Traavik says of the way in which the protagonists opened up about the most difficult and intimate parts of their pasts.
Sharing the directing duties came with challenges which sometimes mirrored those faced by the couples in the film. “We have been equal partners in shaping this film whereas before it has been more me calling the shots,” Traavik reflects on their evolving creative collaboration. “Also, we have had a man/woman male/female dialectic going. We are not romantic partners but we are close friends and know each other really well. We have had our fights and our kitchen sink realism moments – but always from a point of view where we understand each other’s language. And we always come out with something that made the film better than it would have been otherwise.”
“It was a very good learning experience of working with someone, co-directing with someone and reaching solutions,” Kim agrees. She hopes now that viewers of the documentary will “learn and feel something beyond the headlines they read in the news – and see something more than a person who lives in a country that is producing nuclear weapons, or is ready to go to the war with the South or US. I hope we can begin to see them [the North Koreans] as also people who just want to be happy and have a satisfying life, not as some communist propaganda tool.”
Dogwoof is launching world sales at Sheffield and there’s already strong interest from festivals.
