Shadow Flowers: There's No Place Like Home

North Korean defectors' harrowing escapes are well-documented. But what about those who wish to return? That less-common tale is rarely told. Which is exactly what makes Yi Seung-un's Shadow Flowers — which had its North American premiere in MoMA's Doc Fortnight — so curious. This feature-length documentary concerns Kim Ryun-hee, a decidedly tenacious woman who left North Korea in search of better medical treatment only to find herself trapped in South Korea unable to return. She certainly leaves no stone unturned: She brands herself a spy, engages in passive resistance, attempts suicide, holds press conferences, seeks assistance from the Vietnamese consulate, and networks with fellow ex-pats. Yet time and again, her effort to get back to her husband and daughter is met with bureaucratic delays. Even her renegade act of connecting with North Korean players at a good will hockey game is met with a wall of yellow-vested bodies that prevent her from making physical contact of any kind.

Over seven years in, government leadership may have experienced drastic upheavals in Seoul but Kim consistently appears no closer to success than she did when she arrived. "The kitchen appliances are better," Rhee quips at one point about South Korea but she also notes that her totalitarian regime had free healthcare, reasonable work hours, and built-in retirement plans. When she argues with a lone older protestor about dictator Kim Jong-un, the man-on-the-street's reply is "Go back to your own country" to which she responds: "I can't." After that, somewhat bewildered, he comments, "I need a smoke" then puts down his protest sign. Perhaps Yi's film can pick up where Kim's enemies left off.

Planet of Snail: He's Deaf, Blind and Happily Married

You don't have to surf too long on YouTube to track down some archival footage of deaf-blind disability-celebrity Helen Keller speaking in her strange, otherworldly tongue. Barely intelligible, she sounds as if she were speaking a foreign, even alien, language akin to English but not quite. That said, her incomprehensible speech registers as something of a miracle. How in the world do you learn to talk if you can't hear or see the words? Is it all vibration and touch? However she did it, you won't find a similarly eerie vocalizing from Korean deaf-blind Young-chan who actually sounds pretty normal in Yi Seung-jun's Planet of Snail. But the truth of the matter is that although blind like Keller, he's not completely deaf -- he hears sounds as if through a fog. Even so, you do get the sense that he too exists on that other planet, as you watch him "hear" other people as they type words out on the backs of his fingers or read braille by way of a device slung over his shoulder like an electric guitar.

Like Keller before him, Young-chan's a writer but whereas Keller was a memoirist, Young-chan is a poet and aspiring playwright. It's the latter that gets the most screen time in Planet of Snail, as he goes to visit a theater company staging a play about a deaf-blind woman (his critique of the lead actress's performance is almost perfunctory) before mounting a kind of bible play himself with some of his friends from a school for the deaf and blind. He's hardly Beckett made real but there's nevertheless a very definite real-ness in the bleak Job-like reality he's put in script form. Throughout his endeavors, whether he's exercising just outside the kitchen or changing a fluorescent light bulb in the bedroom, he's ably assisted by his wife Soon-ho, a lovely hunchbacked midget who recognizes her soul mate even with his limitations of communication and who loves him enough to support his growing independence, even if it means sacrificing her own sense of purpose in life.