North South Man Woman follows Yujin Han, a North Korean defector who has rebuilt a life in Seoul by running Lovestorya, a matchmaking agency that pairs Northern women with Southern men. Her own North and South marriage serves as persuasive advertising, yet the work that looks like romance is freighted with memory, paperwork and stigma.

Co-directors Morten Traavik and Sun Kim film over five years as clients court, parents weigh in and Yujin’s home life strains under the job she created. Playful musical cues, sly montage and clips from classic Northern cinema set a bright register, while candid testimony introduces harder histories of escape, loss and reinvention. The result is a brisk, surprising study of how intimacy is negotiated on a peninsula still technically at war, attentive to class and gender expectations as much as ideology. The film finally asks whether a shared future can be built through everyday compromises, and what it costs to sell a hopeful story when your own is still being written.