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By Pierce Conran
Though as a theme it has spawned some of Korean cinema's biggest hits, including Shiri (1999), Joint Security Area (2000), Silmido (2003), Taegugki (2004) and Welcome to Dongmakgol (2005), the representation of North Korea on screen has always been a thorny one. It's a sensitive topic that is consistently affected by ebbing political tides. Though many different styles of narrative crop up relating to the Korean republic's Northern neighbor, those that have been most palatable to the public have featured themes of camaraderie across the demilitarized zone, films that stripped characters (mostly soldiers) of their ideologies and showed them for what they really were, which is of course people that are not all that dissimilar from one another.
