The human rights movement makes its way to Video On Demand (VOD) with Kimjongilia, offering all Americans the opportunity to take part through viewing this momentous documentary through instant online viewing or downloading. Testament to the power of the information age to bring to light the atrocities of the world's most isolated nation, this VOD release will reveal the tragedies of the ongoing totalitarian state of Kim Jong Il, the last large-scale totalitarian state of the twentieth century.
Not yet available on DVD, Kimjongilia is accessible now from the comfort of home or on iPod, iPhone, or iPad at MyFilmBlog.com. Winner of the Best Film 2010 from One World Brussels, in co-op with Human Rights Democracy Network, Kimjongilia is a cri de coeur that will put North Korea on the table in human rights debates around the world.
To read Filmmaker N.C. Heikin's blog visit Kimjongilia.MyFilmBlog.com. Access bonus interviews not included in the final cut, ask the filmmaker questions, and learn what you can do to stop the death camps in North Korea.
Kimjongilia had its U.S. premiere at New York's Cinema Village and will also be available at select theaters and community screenings across America before the DVD release. Click here to find out about upcoming screenings and learn how you can host a screening in your community.
In a remote wintry forest, a hunter discovers the mummified corpse of a 40-year-old man. A diary is found near the body, detailing the man’s everyday thoughts as he commits suicide through self-imposed starvation. Based on an incredible true story, and adapted from the novella “Until I am a Mummy“ by Shimada Masahiko, Peter Liecthi’s THE SOUND OF INSECTS is a stunning investigation into the mystery of the man’s enigmatic self-destructive motivations. Taking on his point-of-view, the film presents the notebook entries as stream-of-consciousness musings on the world around him as his body dissipates, an attempt to piece together the causes of his disillusionment. With luminous cinematography of the vaulting trees that surround his tented tomb, and of hallucinated memories of the cities and people he left behind, THE SOUND OF INSECTS is a hypnotic and transcendent meditation on how the renunciation of life paradoxically reveals its beauty.
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In Emmanuel Laurent’s new documentary, “Two in the Wave,” the “two” are the filmmakers François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. The wave, needless to say, is La Nouvelle Vague, a journalistic name that not only stuck to Truffaut, Mr. Godard and their colleagues, but that also changed the way film history is understood.
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Arthouse distributor Richard Lorber, of Kino Lorber, was one of the few arriving at the festival in a “glass half-full” kind of mood. Lorber sees the landscape changing for the better, and is eager to find opportunities. But he releases movies in a handful of theaters; this festival is made for his kind of business.
Count on Lorber and IFC and Sony Classics to be picking up quality titles for crumbs.
The documentary Kimjongilia is a total experience of North Korea that layers music, animated sequences, interpretive dance, and, most strikingly, harrowing interviews with escapees of the totalitarian state, interwoven with hallucinatory propaganda footage. Filmmaker N.C. Heiken creates a consistent and incredibly unusual sensibility in her film of pain and propaganda. Hundreds of thousands of North Koreans fill stadiums in praise of their leader with gymnastics, fireworks and synchronized marching formations – the footage may remind viewers of Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will. This footage is edited together with the voices and faces of victims behind the veneer who reveal a human loneliness and despair that is rarely communicated in life.
This film is a visceral reminder of the devastating injustices practiced around the world today. This is a country where a “crime” committed by one person leads to the life-long imprisonment of three generations of his or her family, and where children are forced to watch their family members publicly executed. In one particularly memorable testimonial, a man recounts how he escaped the prison camp at the expense of his friend’s life: the friend was electrocuted as he passed through the barbed wire fence, allowing him to escape unscathed.
Awarded the EST FILM 2010 from One World Brussels, in co-op with Human Rights Democracy Network, Kimjongilia examines the mass illusion possible under totalitarianism and the human rights abuses required to maintain that illusion.