If I were asked to choose any country in the world for a trip where all expenses would be paid and would include a guide from a nation that would allow me access everywhere, I’d pick North Korea. This would sound like rank insanity by most of the people living there. After all since North Korea split from the South after both the Soviet Union and the U.S. liberated the entire country from the Japanese in 1945, the North to fall under Soviet communist influence and the South under the U.S., 300,000 people have risked their lives to leave. The reason for my odd ambition? The forbidden fruit. Anybody and his second cousin can travel from the U.S. to London, Paris and Rome, but I’d guess that fewer than 1,000 Americans have ever gone over to the Pyongyang regime to explore the world’s most isolated country. This is a region that has no idea what’s going in the world except to hear that Americans are evil and that their own state is a workers’ paradise. They get no outside TV, no Internet access, at least from what one gathers from N.C. Keiken’s documentary, and though Dear Leader Kim Jong-Il is said to have a vast treasury of Hollywood films in his residence, presumably only an elite corps of North Koreans have seen anything made outside their own propaganda mills.
KIMJONGILIA
Lorber Films
Reviewed for Arizona Reporter by Harvey Karten
Grade: B+
Directed by: N.C. Heikin
Written By: N.C. Heikin
Cast: Kang Choi Hwan, Lee Shin, Choi Young Hun, others
Screened at: Critics’ DVD, NYC, 3/7/10
Opens: March 19, 2010 at New York’s Cinema Village
"Kimjonilia," the title coming from a flower presented to the nation’s leader on his forty-sixth birthday, elicits testimony of a few people who escaped from North Korea, some by crossing over to China where they faced extradition by the Beijing regime, some to Mongolia, which does not send political prisoners back, one family that took a scary 200-mile trip by water in a boat, taking advantage of a three-day fog to evade the radar of the N. Korean navy. So far as we can tell by this film, none of the refugees got to the U.S. but that is presumably the subject of a future film.
Writer-director N.C. Heikin’s principal technique is to make ironic contrasts between the propaganda films of the state, some of which show hundreds of men and women in military outfits and decorative costumes that resemble the attire of bridesmaids performing impressively like a huge group of Radio City Rockettes, kicking in perfect rhythm with one another. Smaller agitprop pictures show workers happily tossing hay or, in the case of two children whose father had died, joining their mom in staring lovingly at a picture of Kim Il-Sung, the father of the present head of state, Kim Jong-Il. All have been programmed to regard Kim Jong-il as a god in a land that forces atheism on all.
By contrast, we hear stories of a famine that wiped out over a people in 1995: even the soldiers, the last people a leader would want to cross, suffered from malnutrition. Stories abounded about extreme punishments meted out by the government. Anyone who tries to escape the concentration camps housing political prisoners or even abstains from telling the authorities about a planned escape is executed immediately by a firing squad. A concert pianist is tortured for fourteen hours, hanging upside down and protecting his hands by holding them under his armpits. He made the mistake of playing a composition by a French composer and is denounced as a capitalist. He escapes to a border village in China where a poor family cares not a whit about his music but uses him as a servant, knowing that he cannot protest his working conditions.
Aside from the government’s propaganda films, N.C. Heikin’s photographer, Kyle Saylors has no celluloid of his own taken within North Korea, which is this documentary’s principal shortcoming, so Heikin instead has Koreans perform interpretative dancing to depict the cruelties of the regime. In the case of a North Korean woman who is sold by traffickers and forced to perform sexually, the dancer, legs splayed, writhes about the floor. Piano compositions by Michael Gordon inform the soundtrack.
We in the U.S. are all too familiar with the atrocities inflicted by the North Korean government for the sole purpose of keeping the current regime in power. One citizen, now living as a political refugee, predicts that anarchy will reign when Kim Jong-Il dies, though no such condition arose when the leader’s father departed from the earth and designated his son as successor.
Here in the West where I-Pods are everywhere and lacking a smart phone marks an individual as a pariah, it’s a sad but all-too-true situation that a North Korean who might come across a BlackBerry and use it would be shot summarily. The film deserves to be seen by a wide audience, though educating only those of us living in the free world will not help change the Pyongyang regime one whit.
Unrated. 75 minutes. © 2010 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online
