A BELLFLOWER
KYUN SOON JOO

O.V. Korean

The reminiscences of a man who regrets his past transgressions and pines for his true love. She is more resilient, however, having long since chosen to work alone for the common good. A Bellflower deals with sacrifice (unsurprisingly, a recurring theme in North Korean cinema) through a melodrama about love and regret. It draws odd parallels to La Fontaine’s fable, La cigale et la fourmi (The Cricket and the Ant), bizarrely revisited by a romanticism that marches to the beat of communist...