“Are you a girl or a boy?” the psychologist asks the child. The film is the portrait of day-to-day childhood. A village, a family, a little boy who likes to wear dresses, the return of the wolf and everyday life, ordinary, banal. These elements are used to tell of hidden desires.“Dream of beautiful things”, says the mother, to lull the child to sleep.

When fugitive Ayaan encounters a man on a rural beach, she must decide whether to trust him, or journey on alone.

When we watched these video cassettes at home on a colour TV, we saw things whose existence we had never before imagined”, answers one of the former citizens of North Korea interviewed in The Fantastic. He is evoking films watched illegally, as North Korea is completely closed. Only 1% of inhabitants have access to the exterior of the country and the echoes that reach them from the world are mainly through western fictional films that are smuggled in via China, on video cassette from the 1990s onwards, then on USB sticks. In a routine which is well orchestrated by the regime, the North Koreans experiment with new things, the elsewhere, the other… However, without points of reference and without knowledge of what this other reality might be, the films seen plunge them into the incertitude provoked by this unknown world. To what extent do these fictional films reflect ”reality”? In order to evoke this confrontation between images and fantasies of the outside world, Maija Blåfield films North Korea seen from the Chinese border and the South Korean demilitarised zone, landscapes that are transformed by video and digital filter effects to let the fantastic appear.

December 24, 1983, 10:50 p.m.; Julie and her cousins ate too much sugar, Santa Claus is late and Denis, alone in his car, is anxious at the idea of setting foot in his ex-in-law's house to pick up his children. Les grandes claques is an early coming-of-age coming-of-age that is as squeaky as it is poetic.