PRESS CONFERENCE
Kimjongilia -
The Day We Surrender To The Air
As part of the 12th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, a press conference was held by the directors Nancy Heikin (Kimjongilia) και Antonio Jose Guzman (The Day We Surrender To The Air), on Sunday, March 14, 2010.
Nancy Heikin’s film Kimjongilia looks for the truths hidden by the North Korean totalitarian regime, revealing the real face of a country that is strictly isolated from the rest of the world to the viewer. For obvious reasons, the director did not shoot the film in North Korea, however her documentary masterfully sketches out the portrait of the country, juxtaposing the testimony of refugees who escaped from the country’s concentration camps with the establishment’s propaganda material. Nancy Heikin told how the idea for the film was born: “While at a conference on human rights in North Korea, I was informed about the existence of concentration camps there. I felt like I had been struck by lightning”. The director, who is of Jewish descent, felt she could not keep silent about this issue. In Kimjongilia former inmates of these camps tell frightening stories about what happens there, they speak of mass starvation, while they describe some seemingly impossible escapes, sending a message of hope at the same time. “Some of these people were very eager to speak. However others didn’t want to show their face, whether because they wish to go back to North Korea some day, or because they are afraid for their families who still live there”, the director noted.
Asked about whether the aim of these people is to escape to any country or if they want to go to South Korea, Nancy Heikin explained that these refugees simply have no choice. And she added: “The first thing on their mind is ‘I want to eat’, nothing more. When they manage to get to neighboring China and find food, they think of how to get out of the country, since there they are in danger of being sold to slave traders, of being arrested, jailed, or deported back to North Korea. The only safe place for them is South Korea, where at least they speak the language”. Nancy Heikin stressed that her purpose when making the film was not to record a reality using a journalistic point of view. “I want to tell stories about human rights in an artistic way”, she stated. After Kimjongilia the director returned to fiction filmmaking, and she is currently in the process of making another documentary. She stated: “Fiction often reveals the truth in stories with greater power. In my opinion, one genre can deepen and enrich the other”.
Antonio Jose Guzman’s documentary The Day We Surrender To The Air is about the director’s efforts to trace his genetic identity and see to what extent it influences who he is. An analysis of his DNA showed that the director can trace his origins to Africa, Central and South America, as well as Sephardic Jewish Europe. This documentary, screened at the 12th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival is part of a trilogy. The first part is a video where the director presents the cultural identity of his ancestors. In the second part, he looks at the unexpected similarities he noticed in the peoples of various continents where he searched for his roots. In the third part, which has yet to be made, Antonio Jose Guzman will continue his search into his Jewish Sephardic past, enriching it with images from Spain, Portugal and Israel. “The fact that I end up in places that have been marked by a strong Sephardic community presence such as Amsterdam and Thessaloniki is interesting”, he commented. He believes that “descent influences what every person is: what we are in reality is ‘international individuals’. We must remember our common descent, which is from Africa”, he stressed. As he explained, in spite of the fact that there have been many films made in the past about multiculturalism and identity, “there is always room for one more film which essentially says that all people are one family – especially in our time, when extreme right-wing elements are increasing in societies all over the world”. Having grown up in Panama, a country which has lived the dominance of the USA for almost a century, the director admits that his country is: “now nationalistic and chauvinistic”. However, he remains optimistic, saying: “in Europe and Latin America people are struggling to become European. Perhaps this is why they are more European than those who are born in Europe”.
