Many Japanese directors make family dramas — it's the default setting for serious filmmakers here — but they are usually not telling their own family stories, however fictionalized.
One who does is Yang Yong Hi. Born and raised in Osaka's zainichi (ethnic Korean) community, she debuted as a director with "Dear Pyongyang," a 2005 documentary that told the story of her father, who emigrated to Japan from the southern Korean island of Cheju but after the partitioning of the country in 1945 became a fervent supporter of North Korea. When she was 6 her three teenage brothers were sent by her father to live in North Korea as part of a "repatriation" wave of zainichi who dreamed of a socialist paradise.
The enormity of that error and its lifelong consequences are the themes of Yang's first fiction feature, "Kazoku no Kuni (Our Homeland)," which also draws on her family history and was screened in the Forum section of this year's Berlin Film Festival, winning the CICAE Prize.