The Fantastic is a film about encountering the unknown and the relationship between imagination and reality. The film is built on interviews with exiled North Koreans, who describe what they imagined the outside world to be like, based on their experiences of watching smuggled western fiction films. Alternating documentary footage and visual effects, the film raises the question of how reality is defined and what we wish to believe in. The Fantastic reverses the set-up where westerners are peeping in on the everyday life of the closed-off state. In this film, it is the North Koreans who direct their curiosity at the outside world and imagine what life in Western countries is like. The Fantastic does not include any archival footage.
Maija Blåfield
Maija Blåfield is a filmmaker from Helsinki, Finland. Her works lay between documentary and experimental film. The films include The Fantastic (2020), On Destruction and Preservation (2018), Golden Age (2015) and Saving the World (2005). She received the main prize at 57th Ann Arbor film festival 2019, the State Prize for the Media Arts in Finland in 2014 and was nominated for Ars Fennica award in 2017.