PUSAN, South Korea — One might say that film is the last taboo in the cultural exchanges between the estranged Koreas. Classical musicians, pop stars, athletes, dancers, acrobats and even cheerleaders have crossed the 38th parallel in recent years. But celluloid has rarely spanned the great divide.
Overcoming long-held fears that the medium could be a powerful ideological tool, this week's Pusan International Film Festival is offering the first extensive screening of North Korean movies in the South.
Festival organizers have picked seven films that range in genre and period. They include "My Hometown," a black-and-white classic about a peasant uprising styled after Sergei Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin," and the 1993 romantic comedy "They Met on the Daedong River."
"This is the official opening of the cinema world between the two countries," the film festival's chairman, Kim Dong Ho, said at a news conference Sunday.
The breakthrough event has been long in the planning. Every year of the previous five, organizers had asked permission to show films from the North and been refused by their government on the grounds that the films violate national security laws, which prohibit the propagation of Communist ideology.
This year, permission was granted, but not until Saturday, the third day of the 10-day festival. The late notice meant that it was impossible to invite North Korean directors to publicize the films or organize seminars about them. South Korea's National Intelligence Service also barred the public from attending screenings of two of the films, limiting the audience to journalists and VIP guests.
"The main reason is that film can have a tremendous impact before a large audience, so we have to be especially careful with film," Kim said.
In fact, North Korean leader Kim Jong Il is known to be a film buff who has a private collection of thousands of titles. He also is a serious film student and in 1987 published a book titled "On the Art of Cinema."
"Today, cinema has the task of contributing to the development of people to be true Communists and to the revolutionization and working-classization of the whole of society," Kim wrote in the book's preface.
In one of the more bizarre incidents in Korean relations, Kim is believed to have ordered the kidnapping of a South Korean director and his actress wife in 1978 because he admired their work and wanted them to upgrade the North Korean film industry. Director Shin Sang Ok and actress Choi Eun Hee spent eight years in North Korea making films before they escaped in 1986.
