Yang Yong-hi

Yang Yong-hi (ヤン・ヨンヒ) is a Japanese-born Korean (or Zainichi) film director. Yang has directed multiple films, particularly focusing on her cultural and familial experiences in modern North Korea.

Life and career Yang Yong-hi is a second-generation Korean resident who was born in Osaka, Japan on 11 November 1964. She belongs to the ethnic Korean minority community in Japan, many of whom are descendants of Koreans brought there during Japan's 1910-1945 colonial rule of Korea. Yang studied at the Korea University in Tokyo and New School University, where she gained a master's in media studies. She is fluent in three languages.

Her famed documentary Dear Pyongyang picked up the Jury Special award in the World Cinema section for documentaries at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, and the NETPAC Award at the 56th Berlin International Film Festival. She based it on her dual identity and her difficult relationship with her father. Yang's father was an influential member of the GAKR (General Association of Korean Residents in Japan, or "Chongryon" which is also sometimes referred to as "Soren") — a controversial organization in Tokyo that ostensibly helps North Koreans in Japan with travel or legal problems, but may also act as a pipeline between North Korea and family members in South Korea. She and her father had passionate political arguments over the years. Chongryon, the organization Yang's father was an influential member of, actually demanded a written apology from Yang for offending North Korea through her documentary Dear Pyongyang which Yang refused to give.

Growing up as the daughter of a North Korean patriot was fraught with difficulties, but Yang points out that she "was lucky. 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 first visited North Korea as part of a high school field trip, and she returned there several times and got to know her niece, named Sona. Her second documentary Sona, the Other Myself is a tribute to the time Yang spent with her family in North Korea, showing unused footage collected during her earlier visits to North Korea. In it Yang lingers over Sona's guileless infant-hood followed by her forced induction into the rigidly disciplinarian North Korean educational system. It highlights the innocence of her niece in the brief period before school changed her, initiating her into loyalty to the North Korean government whereby she could recite party line rhetoric and songs to celebrate the glory of "our father." It also won Sakura Ando the Best Actress Award and Arata Iura the Best Supporting Actors Award at the 2012 Blue Ribbon Awards where the film itself won Best Screenplay and Best Feature Film.

In 2012, Yang said she was still afraid for her brothers' safety after the release of her films over the previous 15 years, but would continue to make films about her family.

Filmography Dear Pyongyang (2005) Sona, the Other Myself (2010) Our Homeland (2012) Soup and Ideology (2021)