Background
Yang Yong-hi is a second-generation Korean resident who was born in Osaka, Japan on 11 November 1964. She based it on her dual identity and the difficult relationship with her father.
ヤン・ヨンヒ
Yang Yong-hi is a second-generation Korean resident who was born in Osaka, Japan on 11 November 1964. She based it on her dual identity and the difficult relationship with her father.
Yang studied at the of Korea University in Tokyo and New School University, where she gained a master"s in media studies.
She belongs to the ethnic Korean minority community in Japan, many of them descendants of Koreans brought there during Japan"s 1910-1945 colonial rule of of Korea. She is fluent in three languages. Her famed documentary Dear Pyongyang picked up the Jury Special award at the World Cinema section for documentaries at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, and the NETPAC Award at the 56th Berlin International Film Festival.
She and her father had passionate political arguments over the years.
Growing up as the daughter of a North Korean patriot was fraught with difficulties, but Yang points out that she "was lucky. Her second documentary Sona, the Other Myself is a tribute to the times Yang spent with her family in North of Korea, showing unused footage collected during her earlier visits to North of Korea.
Yang went back and forth between Tokyo and Pyongyang with her camera, first to shoot Dear Pyongyang and then to concentrate on Sona, before she was officially banned from entering North of Korea in 2006.
As the youngest child and the only girl, I was spared the fate of my three older brothers, which was to be shipped back to Pyongyang in their late teens." Her father"s decision was motivated by the well-intentioned desire to spare his sons the social discrimination suffered by North Korean boys in Japan, but sending her brothers back to the fatherland tore the family apart.
Yang"s father was an influential member of the GAKR (General Association of Korean Residents in Japan, or "Chongryon") -- a controversial organization in Tokyo that ostensibly helps North Koreans in Japan with travel or legal problems, or acts as a pipeline between North of Korea and their families in the archipelago.