A long way home: the rhetoric of family and familiarity in Yang Yong-hi’s Pyongyang Trilogy

Abstract

ABSTRACT Nothing is more emblematic of the increasingly transnational and decentralized conditions for filmmaking in Japan today than Yang Yong-hi’s meteoric rise from a freelance video journalist to a leading minority director in Japan. In just over seven years, Yang has collected awards in film festivals including Berlin, Sundance, and Yamagata with two documentary features and one narrative fiction that she completed with Japanese and South Korean funding. But the cosmopolitan reception of Yang’s works belies the fact that all her works to date have singularly focused on the obstinacy of the national border that has divided her family: her brothers in Pyongyang and her parents in Osaka. This study offers an analysis of Yang’s ‘Pyongyang Trilogy’ comprising Dear Pyongyang (2005), Sona, the Other Myself (2009) and Our Homeland (2012), with a particular emphasis on her creative uses of familial framing, that is to say, snapshots, home videos, and family melodrama. I examine the ways in which ‘family’ functions as a critical third space outside the national paradigm of the diaspora discourse, on the one hand, and the post-sovereign paradigm of independent cinema, on the other hand.