The Most Beautiful Moment of War

In 2014, Argentine artist Adrián Villar Rojas was invited by SAMUSO: Space for Contemporary Art to participate in the REAL DMZ PROJECT. The artist asked to spend one month with his team in Yangji-ri, a small village in the buffer zone of the DMZ, where he proposed to develop and document a series of activities to trigger a state of fiction involving the entire village’s community and its close neighbors. Confidence and empathy soon grew between the artist and the community, allowing his camera to grasp every detail of this shared intimacy, framed by the Yangji-ri daily life. The outcome of this experience was a feature-length film, The Most Beautiful Moment of War, which premiered at the 69th Berlinale in 2017. Villar Rojas’s double purpose of making a documentary and a theatrical play-film- hybrid fiction becomes clear in the final credits: listing the entire Yangji-ri population, which also serves as the first census in the village’s history.