“A Temporality of Imminent, Never-Consummated Arrival”: Contemporary German Documentaries on North Korea

abstract:This article investigates two contemporary German documentaries that attempt to look beyond negative stereotypes of North Korea: Eine Postkarte aus Pjöngjang (Gregor Möllers and Anne Lewald, 2019) and Meine Brüder und Schwestern im Norden (Cho Sung-hyung, 2016). I argue that the films put forward “a temporality of imminent, never-consummated arrival” by projecting multifaceted imagination onto the natural and urban landscapes of North Korea. In Postcard, the future of transnational solidarity has remained forestalled from the GDR era to the present; in Cho’s film, the affect of ethnic unity is suspended in a perpetual oscillation between identification and non-belonging.