Women and Girls Lead was among the many public media items discussed at this year’s INPUT conference in Seoul, Korea.
A big chunk of the public broadcasting world was in Seoul, Korea, attending INPUT, an annual conference where filmmakers, broadcasters, and distributors gather to watch and discuss the best public media programs of the year.
But another bit of exchange took place that day, as some 150 attendees turned out to hear Jennifer Lawson of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and other panelists discuss the role of public broadcasting in focusing, educating, and connecting audiences around critical issues — in this case, equal access to opportunities for women and girls.
The panel helped build interest and excitement for the official launch of Women and Girls Lead — a multiyear public media initiative featuring films and other media by the world’s best independent producers — a week later at the PBS Annual Meeting in Orlando, Florida. Continue reading →
Last week, a North Korean border guard shot four Chinese citizens, killing three, near Dandong along the tense border between the two countries. This comes just over a year since Current TV reporters Euna Lee and Laura Ling were arrested by North Korean guards at a different stretch of border in March of 2009 and sentenced to 12 years in a labor camp (former President Bill Clinton negotiated their release in August of the same year).
While China and North Korea historically have been politically and economically friendly, the increasingly erratic and provocative behavior of North Korea’s leadership has strained relations in recent years. That is precisely the story Chinese-born filmmaker Liang Zhao set out to tell when he went back to his childhood home in Dandong, situated on the border with North Korea. In his film Return to the Border, which airs beginning this Sunday on Global Voices (PBS WORLD), Liang goes back to his hometown only to find it vastly changed from his childhood decades ago. In the intervening years, North Korean President Kim Il-sung died and was succeeded by his son Kim Jong-il. China abandoned its isolationism and began trading with the West, further alienating its fellow communists in North Korea. North Koreans suffered a brutal famine, in which as many as 2 million died.
Liang talks Dandong residents and former North Korean citizens, and tours the border, even covertly entering North Korea to bear witness to the strange militarism of its culture and fearful behavior by its citizens. Border guards appear, and quietly ask for cigarettes and food. The film explores how borders are purely man-made barriers, and how common humanity transcends them on a daily basis.
Tune in to watch Return to the Border — premiering Sunday on Global Voices (check local listings)— for a glimpse into this controversial line on the map for context into the conflicts there that are making the news today.
“So compelling that you can’t stop watching,”
- Wall Street Journal
A growing and potentially explosive humanitarian crisis is threatening East Asian peace: the life and death of North Koreans as they try to escape their homeland and China. SEOUL TRAIN exposes the complex geopolitics and bureaucracy entangling the lives of thousands of North Korean refugees as well as the story of activists who put themselves in harms way to save them via a clandestine underground railroad.
