A new film grant with an aim toward supporting defectors of the brutal North Korean regime has launched in Los Angeles.
Founded by entrepreneurs and film investors Blaine Vess and Esther Paik Vess, the Bearing North film grant will award “independent filmmakers worldwide at any stage of production,” per Variety.
The initiative covers documentary features, narrative features, and short films, with a stated preference for projects brought forward by North Korean defectors.
The founders bring prior involvement in the space: Blaine Vess has served on the board of Liberty in North Korea for more than a decade, and the couple have previously supported North Korea-related documentaries including “I Am Sun Mu,” “Assassins,” and “Beyond Utopia.”
Blaine Vess said the film grants will seek to highlight stories that explore the dynamics of North Korea – a brutal regime run by dictator Kim Jong Un.
“Some of the films that have most shaped how we understand history arrived decades after the events they depict,” Blaine Vess said. “We created Bearing North because important stories about North Korea are unfolding now, while the people who lived them, the places where they happened, and the perspectives surrounding them are still within reach.”
The group’s first grant was awarded to School for Defectors from filmmaker Jeremy Workman, which reportedly “tracks students at the Jangdaehyun School in Busan, South Korea – an institution serving North Korean defectors and their families.”
“North Korea is often reduced to headlines about missiles and politics,” Blaine Vess said. “Great filmmakers have the ability to show us something much harder to capture: how ordinary people live, hope, adapt, and endure.”