I seem to spend my days recently, trawling the internet, search after search, trying to find North Korean films to buy on DVD. Quite often the sources are limited and the opportunity of English subtitles non-existent. But the search will continue until I get my hands on the mother-lode.

One film that keeps cropping up is Souls Protest (2000), which is often described as the North Korean Titanic. Such simple and lazy comparisons are often very satisfying, and it’s easy to see how the barn-storming 1997 film made quite an impression in the DPRK as pirate DVDs just started to arrive in the country at that time.

The film even gained a release in South Korea (after a few edits at the hands of the censors) making this dramatisation of the Ukishima Maru incident one of the few films to make it “south of the border”.

I’ve added the trailer above which certainly makes me desperate to track it down, but for now we’ll just have to deal with what wikipedia and a few glimpses of what the film might be like.