When We Pick Apples

Caught in forbidden love, Yong Joon defects from North Korea, leaving Jae Sung behind. Years later, a reunion forces him to choose between past and present.

In feudal Korea, a group of starving villagers grow weary of the orders handed down to them by their controlling king and set out to use a deadly monster under their control to push his armies back.

Jean, a young French hooligan, is sent on a forced vacation to his grandfather Evald, who lives in the Slovenian countryside. Despite Evald's warm welcome, Jean remains quite withdrawn, speaks only French with his grandfather, and coldly rejects his lifestyle, which is mainly devoted to tending the orchard and selling apples on the local road. While they struggle to get used to life together, frost is slowly approaching Evald's orchard.

A neo-nazi sentenced to community service at a church clashes with the blindly devotional priest.

A New York gangster and his girlfriend attempt to turn street beggar Apple Annie into a society lady when the peddler learns her daughter is marrying royalty.

A pious old man, who is a proponent of suicide attackers, comes to Kabul to visit his only son, who, after the holy war had remained in the Soviet Union. He had enrolled his son in a religious school "to study the Koran and return to the village as a Mullah". In Kabul he learns that his son had decided to become a divine suicide bomber so as to go to Heaven. The film presents two different forces of the inner world of the protagonist father: paternal feelings and the holy religious ideology. The spectator witnesses how he loses his only son and holy belief. Shot in chaotic and dirty Kabul, the film portrays the incorrect interpretation of religion and the conflict of generations.

Poongsan has the unenviable - and death-defying - job of delivering messages across the North and South Korean border to separated families. When South Korean government agents ask him to smuggle in In-ok, the lover of a high-ranking North Korean defector, into the South, the damsel and rescuer fall in love instead.

Apples are always something to fear.

Seven year old Sasha practices violin every day to satisfy the ambition of his parents. Already withdrawn as a result of his routines, Sasha quickly regains confidence when he accidentally meets and befriends worker Sergei, who works on a steamroller in their upscale Moscow neighborhood.

Sugihara, a Japanese-born, third-generation Korean teenager struggles to find a place in a society that will not accept him.

In 1900, a clan attempts to strike a deal with a Chicago industrialist to get him to build cotton mills in their Deep South town.

After twelve years of imprisonment by their own parents, two Iranian sisters are finally released by social workers to face the outside world for the first time.

A love story between two apples is interrupted after one is abruptly stolen from the other.

In the wake of Glasgow’s rapid deindustrialization and economic decline in the 90s, a young Fraser falls victim to knife crime and is indelibly marked with a “Glasgow smile”, irrevocably impacting his sense of self and relationship to food.

In Alexandru Tatos’s debut film, a young urologist is assigned to a town hospital with no urology ward and keeps bumping up against his superiors because of both ethical and medical problems.

Sung-geun is an untalented actor who makes a living playing minor roles. He happens to land on the role as Kim Il-sung, the former leader of North Korea, for the rehearsal of the South-North Korea Summit. Sung-geun becomes passionately immersed in his role, motivated by his son who looks up to him. However, the summit is not realized, and Sung-geun ends up lost in the delusion that he really is Kim Il-sung.

In WW2, twelve year old Soviet orphan Ivan Bondarev works for the Soviet army as a scout behind the German lines and strikes a friendship with three sympathetic Soviet officers.

A chronicle of a few days in a small family, a story about the difficulties of human contacts, the complexity of love. The image of red apples - strong and clear, profound and lucid. Okeyev's "apple" bears a special meaning. Juices of the earth and sun, it is a lyrical symbol of happiness and harmony.

From the late 1950s through the '70s, more than 90,000 of the ethnic Koreans in Japan emigrated to North Korea, a country that promised them affluence, justice, and an end to discrimination. KAZOKU NO KUNI tells the story of one of their number, who returns for just a short period. For the first time in 25 years, Sonho is reunited with his family in Tokyo after being allowed to undergo an operation there. Sonho’s younger sister Rie is at the centre of the film, and is not hard to recognise as the director’s alter-ego. In her documentaries DEAR PYONGYANG and SONA, THE OTHER MYSELF, Yang Yonghi told the story of her own life, and how, at age six, she experienced the departure of her three older brothers, who left their family for Pyongyang.

Shrouded in secrecy and notoriously cash-strapped the North Korean regime has resorted to running one of the world's largest slaving operations - exploiting the profits to fulfil their own agenda. These bonded labourers can be found in Russia, China and dozens of other countries around the world including EU member states. Featuring undercover footage and powerful testimonials, we reveal the scale and brutality of the operation and ask what, if anything, is being done to stop it.