The Fantastic (2021)

2021-10-1530m

In Maija Blåfield’s documentary, eight former North Koreans talk about what it was like to watch illegal films in a closed society. In addition to the 'waste videos', South Korean films were also smuggled into the country via China.

Related Movies

1304681-thumbnail

Exorcismo: The Transgressive Legacy of Clasificada “S” (2024)

Spain, 1975. Franco's death opens the door to the possibility of uncensored cinema. After two years of relaxed censorship, it is abolished in 1977, and the “S” rating is created to protect viewers from films that may “offend their sensibilities.”

76177-thumbnail

Texas Chain Saw Massacre: The Shocking Truth (2000)

A documentary primarily focusing on the filming and release of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

73779-thumbnail

The Secret Life of Brian (2007)

A documentary about the making of the controversial Life of Brian and the surrounding accusations of blasphemy.

80236-thumbnail

Freedom to Love (1969)

A sex education film dedicated to all forms of human sexuality.

369769-thumbnail

Under the Sun (2015)

Over the course of one year, this film follows the life of an ordinary Pyongyang family whose daughter was chosen to take part in Day of the Shining Star (Kim Jong-il's birthday) celebration. While North Korean government wanted a propaganda film, the director kept on filming between the scripted scenes. The ritualized explosions of color and joy contrast sharply with pale everyday reality, which is not particularly terrible, but rather quite surreal.

99964-thumbnail

Uncle Saddam (2000)

Everything you've ever wanted to know about Saddam Hussein (but were afraid to ask).

566162-thumbnail

Inverosímil Jardiel Poncela (2014)

The Spanish author Enrique Jardiel Poncela (1901-1952) was one of the best comedy writers of all time, a novelist and newspaper columnist, misunderstood, even censored, both by the Second Republic government and Francoism, an outsider ahead of his time; also a filmmaker and screenwriter in Hollywood, architect of a revolutionary theatrical building and scenographer, cartoonist and illustrator. An implausible genius.

567253-thumbnail

Little Sister's vs. Big Brother (2002)

This documentary, filmed over a 10-year period, centers on the debate over censorship as it follows Vancouver's Little Sister's Bookstore and its 20-year struggle with Canada Customs over the seizure of books. In the face of bigotry, bombings and repeated book seizures, it wages the most important legal battle in history against Canada Customs.

99397-thumbnail

The Sheik and I (2012)

When an American filmmaker is commissioned to make a film for a Middle East Biennial on the theme of 'art as a subversive act,' his film is banned for blasphemy, he is asked to destroy every copy, and threatened with arrest.

381749-thumbnail

Porn to Be Free (2016)

Italy, 1970. An increasing legion of harmless warriors begins a peaceful struggle for sexual freedom through pornography, shaking and shocking religious authorities and conservative political institutions. They are ironic, happy, crazy. They are dreamers, defenders of definitive communion between body and soul. But they were censored and humiliated. They were mistreated and arrested for demanding loud a new cultural renaissance.

1159180-thumbnail

Haciendo Memoria (2005)

538913-thumbnail

El Cepa Returns (2019)

Forty years later, Guillermo Montesinos, the actor who played José María el Cepa in The Cuenca Crime (1980), directed by Pilar Miró, returns to the various locations where the shooting of the mythical film, narrating the infamous Grimaldos case (1910), took place.

383353-thumbnail

I Am Sun Mu (2015)

Operating under a pseudonym which means 'no boundaries' - North Korean defector Sun Mu creates political pop art based on his life, homeland, and hope for a future united Korea. His hidden identity is nearly compromised when a massive historical exhibit in Beijing is shuttered by Chinese and North Korean authorities.

738533-thumbnail

Presencia lejana (1982)

A documentary about Finnish twin sisters, one of whom disappeared in Argentina in 1977.

534596-thumbnail

90 Seconds in North Korea (2018)

No warheads, no jackbooted soldiers, no statues of the god-emperor – instead, this is a poetic, evocative snapshot of everyday life in North Korea, the country ruled by the world’s most paranoid and secretive regime.

548436-thumbnail

Tiger Spirit (2008)

Korea is a divided nation. Filmmaker Min Sook Lee sets out on a revelatory, emotion-charged journey into Korea’s broken heart, exploring the rhetoric and realism of reunification through the extraordinary stories of ordinary people.

362021-thumbnail

Censored without Censorship (2007)

Through the conversation with Yugoslav film authors and excerpts from their films, this documentary film tells a story of a film phenomenon and censorship, and its focus is, in fact, a painful epoch of Yugoslav film called “a Black Wave”, which was the most important and artistically strongest period of Yugoslav film industry, created in the sixties and buried in the early seventies by means of ideological and political decisions. The film tells a great “thriller” story of the ideological madness which characterised the totalitarian psychology having left multiple consequences felt up to our very days. It stresses similarities between totalitarian regimes defending their taboos on the example of the persecution of the most important Yugoslav film authors. Those film authors have, however, made world careers and inspired many later authors. The film is the beginning of a debt pay-off to the most significant Yugoslav film authors.

546657-thumbnail

Children Gone to Poland (2018)

Tracing the footsteps of North Korean orphans who went to Poland during the Korean War, two women, one from the North and the other from the South, bond through the solidarity of wound and forge together a path toward healing.

1142247-thumbnail

Night Flight with Frank Zappa, Porn Wars (1985)

Frank Zappa stopped by the Night Flight studios in 1985 to talk about music videos, censorship, the PMRC and what it's like to play in his band.

373355-thumbnail

The Lovers and the Despot (2016)

Hong Kong, 1978. South Korean actress Choi Eun-hee is kidnapped by North Korean operatives following orders from dictator Kim Jong-il.