Paris to Pyongyang

Paris to Pyongyang is a 32-minute essay film about post-Korean War era recollections presented through dual narratives: a contingent of French artists and intellectuals visiting North Korea in 1958 who created literary and artistic works (including the feature film Moranbong) about the cross-cultural encounter, and a Korean War family separation story presented from the perspective of the filmmaker’s mother, Jung-Sook Lee. The filmmaker juxtaposes the events and reframes these works and Lee's wartime trauma through a contemporary, inquiring lens. The film proposes how contingencies of language and translation, gender dynamics, and cultural power affect our understanding of socio-political histories and personal, familial memory, in pursuit of new pathways for diasporic aesthetic expressions.