HOW I CAME TO WERITE THIS BOOK: "I thought I had some rather unique experiences, starting out as a 16 year old East German trying to escape to the West, spending a few months in East German jail as a result, then leaving my job as a gravedigger in Leipzig to fight my way out of East Germany legally long before the Berlin Wall fell. Once in West Germany, I became involved in operating an anarchist movie theater, got in contact with the Cinema of Transgression in New York, then moved to New York myself. Eventually I became interested in Asian cinema and ended up getting involved with the North Korean embassy in Berlin and their secret deals to provide films to Dear Leader Kim Jong Il. I just thought, hell, that's a trajectory nobody else ever took. From East German graveyard to the depths of the New York Underground to North Korea. Trying to get a start as a writer, I thought, I've got to write about that! Headpress published the first edition of my book Trashfilm Roadshows in 2002. When I met Headpress publisher David Kerekes during a visit to a Korean cinema conference in London some years later, he asked me for an expanded version of the book, telling many of my previously untold stories. This new edition contains all those new stories while still retaining the original ones published in the 2002 edition.

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