AllMovie

Inspired by the true life tale of a South Korean filmmaker who was kidnapped by the North Koran government and charged with invigorating the North's failing film industry, director Jim Finn's cinema-centric drama tells the story of a South Korean video artist who arrives at a North Korean art residence with the goal of ushering Juche cinema into the 21st Century. A hybrid of Confucian and authoritarian Stalinist pseudo-Socialism, Juche is translated as self-reliance, and plays a crucial part in North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il's philosophy of propaganda, film, and art. When aspiring young video artist Yoon Jung Lee arrives to work at a Juche art residency on a North Korean collective farm, the philosophies of politics and filmmaking quickly begin to converge.