“In a no man’s land between warm love and Cold War, a refugee matchmaker fights to heal her divided homeland — one couple at a time.” So reads the logline for North South Man Woman, a film getting its world premiere at the 32nd edition of the Sheffield DocFest on Friday.

Having escaped from North Korea to affluent South Korea, Yujin Han has worked her way up to run her own matchmaking agency, called Lovestorya, as CEO. The company sets up new female arrivals from the North with South Korean men. Morten Traavik (Liberation Day) and Sun Kim spent five years shooting their documentary about her, the agency, and the relationships between men and women, as well as North and South Korea.

An old Korean proverb — nam nam, buk nyeo — says that the most beautiful women are in the North, and the most handsome men are in the South, we learn from the film, among many other things. But what happens when you try to bring them together? Well, you’ve got to watch and see.

Featuring cinematography by Jānis Šēnbergs and Valdis Celmiņš, the movie will bring an Asian note to Sheffield DocFest, which runs June 18-23.

“Using her own marriage as a key selling point for her business, Yujin acts as counsellor, friend and even surrogate family-in-law to her matched couples,” according to a synopsis of the film on the festival’s website. “However, behind the scenes of her business, Yujin’s family life strains under the pressure of work, gradually forcing her to confront some major life choices of her own. Shot over a five-year period, with remarkable access and evocative archival footage, North South Man Woman presents a frank, multi-layered and frequently humorous perspective on the battle of the sexes, which resonates against the wider canvas of estranged twin nations.”

Check out a trailer for the doc, for which Dogwoof is handling sales duties, here.

Kim is a cultural mediator, photographer, and now a first-time documentary filmmaker. Born and educated in the U.S., she grew up in Seoul and now lives in Brussels. Traavik is a Norwegian director, artist, and executive producer working across artistic genres and borders. Trained as a theater director in
Russia and Sweden, “the notion of the world as a stage and identity as role play is never far away in his works, as well as a characteristically blurred distinction between art, activism, and social issues,” highlights his bio. He is also known for a series of controversial collaborations with North Korean artists and cultural authorities. His installation “Power Games” (2012) made him the first artist to exhibit simultaneously in North Korea and the U.S.

Ahead of their doc’s world premiere at Sheffield, Kim and Traavik talked to THR about North South Man Woman, how they met each other and Han, the role human and political stories play in their film, and why its title likely reminds you of that of a famous Ang Lee movie.

We actually met the first time by the roadside midway between Pyongyang and the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone) border between North and South Korea. So, we met in North Korea back in 2012. I was actually there for the first major collaboration that I did with the North Korean cultural authorities. Norwegians like to celebrate our national holiday, which is on May 17. And this coincided with the early stages of my collaboration with North Korea. So I decided to organize a May 17 Norwegian festival of culture in Pyongyang. And as part of this, our Norwegian delegation went on an excursion down to the DMZ. Halfway there, we met a group of American-speaking, Korean-looking people by a roadside pit stop.

Yeah, that was my first trip to North Korea. I was leading a group of graduate students from the International Relations Department at Columbia University, and they were there to do a dive into North Korean culture from many different aspects. We were at the roadside, and I was just really curious to speak to everyone who was Korean there, because I was one of the few people in my group who spoke Korean. I met Morton, and he immediately asked me if I was North Korean. And I was like, “No,” but that was where we first met. Once we both left North Korea, we found a way to meet again in New York, and we decided to continue our collaboration and work together.

I came across an article in The Guardian in 2018, which told about this particular phenomenon of marriage agencies in the South that specifically catered to North Korean women having arrived in South Korea from the North and South Korean men. I thought it was fascinating on so many levels. The year after, I was invited on a filmmaker’s trip sponsored by the Korean Foundation, which is South Korea’s soft power cultural organization that promotes cultural collaborations with South Korea. And I asked them to connect me to one of those marriage agencies.

Up until then, we had been working mostly with North Koreans who were coming out to do cultural exchange projects or were in North Korea. This was the first time we had an opportunity to work with North Koreans who had emigrated or who had escaped to South Korea. I wasn’t really convinced in the beginning. I read the article, and I thought this could be quite political. I didn’t really want to get into a political mess. But I think the angle of the film, as you see, really doesn’t come from a politicized angle. It’s more about trying to look at what people’s lives are on a human level, what kind of relationships they can have.

I interviewed three different matchmakers. The first two, I met and was not really tempted, and they were not very happy about a collaboration either. They thought that they would have to expose way too much. They weren’t sure they were ready to do that. When I spoke to Yujin, she just really understood, and she was thinking really long term, as in: how will this project impact not just me, but other North Koreans who are living in South Korea? How will it impact my children? And she felt that if it’s for this cause, I want to be a part of it.

I traveled to meet her, and we talked, and I asked if she would be interested in being a part of a documentary about this subject. I think that my background, having been to North Korea a lot, and knowing North Korea from inside, was kind of reassuring to her, and I think that also created a feeling that I was not just another sensationalist guy dropping in.

You’re a model audience. That’s exactly how we want the film to come across. On one hand, it’s very specific given the unique situation of the division of the Korean Peninsula, with all the political implications and all the different layers of history and meaning. But at the same time, the themes are universal. This is reflected in the title as well, which is kind of a riff on the old Ang Lee film Eat Drink Man Woman. That’s also a hint of this universality.

We hope that the film transcends the North Korea-South Korea issues and themes. You could also say, in a way, that Korea is a nation divorced from itself that needs a marriage broker, a mediator between man and woman, and bringing the two sides together. And there are all the skirmishes and peace negotiations, so there are so many obvious metaphors working both ways.

There were a lot of films that were really focused on the journey of North Koreans escaping from North Korea, going through China, life in North Korea, and how suffocating or repressive it is. And I felt that this film was really looking at life after that. What is life like? What is the happily ever after when coming out of this space or this journey, and just investigating whether or not it’s really even possible to be happy after that, or to find partners, to find love, to start a new life? What is it like to start anew? A new start, or looking for love, and what happens between partners are all themes that we don’t really apply to North Koreans who live in South Korea. We still see them as politicized beings. And I wanted to look at them beyond that, a little deeper, and find that human angle.

That’s definitely a good point. It’s like kitchen table diplomacy or bedroom peace talks. Yeah.

I don’t think you can really escape it being political. I’m sure that, at least in Korea, some people will read political messages into the film anyway. So, we can’t really do anything but tell the story as we saw it and as we perceived it. As a filmmaker, you always have to be prepared for interpretations that differ from your own. We included a scene from this memorial at the beginning of the film that shows how charged and politicized the whole issue of defectors from North Korea is in the South.

As a North Korean defector, you are a politicized body in the South because South Korea has a political system, which is like the American model, with two major parties, conservatives and liberals, and they both have their specific angles on the issue of North Korean defectors. All of this actually also testifies to Yujin’s bravery, because being part of this film, she knows that whatever she says and does, it will be interpreted one way or the other.

That’s true. I think that was one of the reservations that all of the people that we interviewed initially had. Will this be seen politically? And how do we not let that impact our businesses, our lives on a daily basis. South Korea is an incredibly, incredibly wired society. The online activity level and the engagement of people with news and blogs, and online material are just unthinkable. It’s just at another level. I mean, their GDPR rules are completely different. And I think what we see is a lot of bravery from Yujin, and also, I think, that desire to show something different.

Yujin is a very attractive woman, she’s a great businesswoman, and she’s had a lot of requests from South Korean media to come on TV or do shows with them, and she basically rejected all of them. But she agreed to do ours because she thought this was different, this had a different angle. It really did make a difference that we were not approaching her as South Koreans, but from an outsider perspective, which wasn’t judgmental, which didn’t have this kind of lens of: “You’re a Northerner. I’m a Southerner. You immigrated here. What are you doing here in our country? How are you using our benefits?” So I think she felt really comfortable being herself, her and her friends. When they heard that both of us had been to North Korea and we had met a lot of North Koreans and understood the culture there, I think that really changed the playing field.

It will be my first time in Sheffield. I am looking forward to it and the audience’s reaction.

Sheffield DocFest definitely is one of the high-hanging fruits in terms of the places to have a world premiere. Neither of us has actually been to Sheffield before. I only know from my old synth pop days that Sheffield has a very credible heritage in electronic music. And that it has a history of steel works, this industrial environment. It’s a big compliment to be invited to be in competition in Sheffield.

Kim I would just like for people to have fun watching it and enjoy the characters for who they are. And, yeah, I’m excited to show it at Sheffield.

Traavik One element that we talked about was the element of trust, and how to obtain trust from the characters in the film. Both of us, to different degrees, being outsiders, but insiders helped. We are a little bit of DMZ creatures. But I could never obtain the level of communication and thereby trust with the female Korean protagonists as Sun has done. Thanks to my experience in Korea, there is this familiarity of different degrees for me and Sun as a team with our protagonists. But at the same time, it has been a huge asset that we are just passing through. They don’t need to meet us at the grocery store after having unloaded some of the very personal, very heavy stories, and also some funny stories. So, I think, that has helped us a lot – being in this space in between.