An annual documentary film festival themed on "peace, life and communication" opened in Camp Greaves, the former U.S. military camp near the Demilitarized Zone, Thursday.

   The seventh edition of the DMZ International Documentary Film Festival will run until next Thursday, featuring 102 documentary films from 43 countries around the world, including 43 from South Korea.

   It will open with "I am Sun Mu," an 87-minute film by American photographer and filmmaker Adam Sjoberg, which follows the defector who lives under the assumed name "Sun Mu" and his art world. Sun Mu worked as propaganda artist in North Korea before fleeing to South Korea in the 1990s.

   Although the opening ceremony and the screening of the opener will take place in the camp, a symbolic venue that remains a legacy of the 1950-53 Korean War in Paju, Gyeonggi Province, theaters in Paju and the nearby city of Goyang in the same province are the festival's main venues.

   The American troops relocated from Camp Greaves in 2004, but public access to the camp is still restricted as it is situated less than 4 kilometers from the DMZ. The Gyeonggi provincial government plans to preserve and renovate as many of the buildings on the base as possible in turning it into a tourist attraction in the years ahead.

   The DMZ is a 4-kilometer-wide, thickly forested military buffer zone, which separates the two Koreas in the middle of the Korean Peninsula. It is a legacy of the Korean War, which ended in a truce, not a peace treaty. (Yonhap)