La chica del sur

Without waiting, in 1989 Jose Luis Garcia replaces his brother in the Argentine delegation going to North Korea to participate in the World Festival of Youth and Students, a political event “disguised” as vacation, with the support of the USSR after the Tiananmen massacre. Garcia takes a VHS camera on this trip of revolutionary tourism and captures images of a North Korea that opens itself for the first time to thousands of young people around the world. His focus is suddenly on Sukyung Lim, a young activist from South Korea, who comes to Pyongyang to defy the prohibition to travel between the two Koreas. Twenty years later, the image of Lim Sukyung crossing the border in Pyongyang still lives in Jose Luis Garcia’s memory and the reunion with the activist becomes an obsession that the filmmaker pursues, transporting us, on the one hand, to the political situation in Korea, and on the other, introducing us to the woman who in ’89 was the hope for reunification between the two regions. (C. C.)