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The Jangmadang Generation produced and prepared by the NGO Liberty North Korea (19659002) LiNK) . The film follows 9 North Korean youth who fled the country and took refuge in South Korea. LiNK is an NGO specializing in the rescue of fugitives from the north and their integration as refugees in the United States and South Korea. .
Sokeel Park, director of the Seoul-based organization and founder of the film, explains part of the project's motivations: "If you talk to people who have fled North Korea, you learn how much our vision of this country has been limited. "
Indeed, it seems that nothing has changed in North Korea over the years after the turnaround of the last few months, a possible international agreement to disarm the Korean peninsula at the cost of keeping Kim in power. However, a silent revolution is occurring locally through a new generation of freedom-hungry entrepreneurs.
Second Park is heavily focused on North Korean rulers and their weapons, while "he forgets some very basic human truths" and that the most interesting things about North Korea are the people themselves.
He insists that The Jangmadang Generation "is not a typical film about North Korea, which treats people solely as victims. […] C & # 39; is a story of resilience, progress and human potential, even in the most unlikely circumstances. "
There are few North Koreans who do not live in extreme poverty. Even if the international agreement is avenged, citizens will remain under the oppressive yoke of the world's most timid regime, the population living all the nuances and peculiarities of a dystopian reality.
This is precisely the purpose of the documentary: The history of millennia, born in the 1980s, who had to circumvent the rules of the government to survive the great wave of hunger years 1990. About 2 million people died of hunger at the time, with Pyongyang stopping to distribute daily rations and the little food still available being usurped by state officials.
In the midst of chaos, families moved to farms where they could eat what they had planted. From this came a little barter: who had corn, made and sold corn noodles; who had rice, made and sold rice cakes.
The illegal trade eventually generated a network of informal markets near the border with China – called jangmadang – which operated in accordance with the capitalist rules of buying and selling and selling. supply and demand despite the socialist regime.
Some of these young people took advantage of the market movement to steal money and food. Others smuggled clothes from China to resell them. A new market opens up for Western, Chinese, Japanese and South Korean films and news, which first appeared in VHS tapes and eventually CDs, DVDs and finally USB sticks.
"I have learned that the North Koreans I've met are the most intelligent, the most hardworking and the most creative.What they prove, is that I Despite all the difficulties, they still have a huge human potential, especially in this generation of jangmadang, they have more potential than any other generation to seek change and progress, both from within and from outside the country, "Park explains
He refers to stories like that of Kang Min., he became a beggar and a market thief for having what to eat. became a seller of apples on trains in which he entered without a ticket and had to flee the inspectors not to be stopped, and later to import batteries, electronics and clothes in China, where he fled and remained hidden until it is saved by LiNK. The young plant of our days of roses with which he prepares tea infusions for resale, while he dreams of being able to return to North Korea and open a tourist agency with organized excursions on both sides of the peninsula
a young a woman of the same generation, counted among the contraband clothes of China similar to those worn by characters from South Korean soap operas – that young people looked at hiding at great risk – and how their "big and beautiful" friends l? helped to "scroll through" the markets, announcing the items he was to sell on the black market without attracting the attention of the authorities. The young woman died of tears while she and her older brother were arrested and tortured by the Pyongyang regime for the "crime" of planning a family reunion in China.
Shimon Huh, also interviewed in the documentary, explains that "what the younger generation wants is freedom".
"You do not have that in North Korea.The older generation has never seen freedom.They lived without knowing what it was.But we grew up in learning and seeing freedom, at the same time we were repressed by the government Our desire for freedom is enormous Freedom means being able to work on your own, or not working there if you do not want to. "
Kang Min, the orphan-robber markets-smuggler-entrepreneur, summarizes with extreme sensitivity the importance of being able to open his own business wherever he wants, to live where he wants and go where he wants. Generation Jangmadang : "I think most people already know the basics, that North Korea has a different system with prison camps and famine, but North Koreans are also people. It's the basics, but it may be so basic that no one thinks about it.North Koreans are people with their own thoughts, and if you look at them in the eyes they will look at yours, and there you will feel something. "
It is precisely in these human stories, among ordinary people subjected to the brutality of Kim's generals, that there is strength, delicacy and the importance of the film. To paraphrase Min, SEE invites you to look into the eyes of these North Koreans and listen to the first person to the voices so seldom heard by all of us.
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