Our Homeland

From the end of the fifties into the seventies, more than ninety thousand people from the Korean minority in Japan went to North Korea on the promise of a life without discrimination. The film follows one of them, who comes back to Tokyo for a short while after twenty five years in order to be treated. The permission granted for the tumour in Sonho’s brain is limited, and an official who watches him wherever he goes comes with him. At the centre of the family stands the younger sister Rie, who was still a child when her brothers left. Yang Yong-hi had told her own family’s story in documentaries before; in this first fiction feature she builds the same separation as fiction instead. The hundred minute Japanese production with Sakura Ando and Arata Iura was completed in 2012.