Kimjongilia

Kimjongilia is the name of a red begonia hybrid bred for Kim Jong Il’s forty-sixth birthday, and the documentary takes its title from that flower. N.C. Heikin talks in South Korea with people who got out of North Korea: those who survived the camps, those who crossed the border, those who lived in China hiding from Chinese and North Korean police alike. Between the testimonies she sets the regime’s own propaganda films and staged performance sequences made for the picture. The starting point was what Kang Chol-hwan told her about being taken to a camp at nine, with his family, and spending ten years there.