I felt really dirty watching this film. The spectator position the camera angle forced me to take is seriously creepy. The way it constantly zooms in on the faces of those little girls is really unsettling. I get it. It is trying to show how bored and disengaged they look when, for example, they are sitting in the audience of an army general telling his scripted war stories. And how contrived and artificial the whole setup is.
But what exactly am I supposed to feel about their situation through this kind of camera works? Pity? Contempt? Anger? Enlightenment? Amusement? Relief over how much better my life has been compared to their "Orwellian" one? I think I'm not the intended audience for this film because I just felt really manipulated.
The premise of this film is fairly simple. When you display both what's meant to go on screen and what's meant to be cut out, you demystify the magic of cinema, and reveals the inherently grotesque silliness of the stage directions inhabiting beneath the making of what was meant to be a moving grand narrative.
But what does that show us about North Korea? That they are oppressive and "Orwellian"? How? Because their cinematic productions are STAGED? Because their actors have SCRIPTED lines? Because they arbitrarily decide and change what scripted career the girl's father really have? Because they picked for a main character someone who happen to be well-off and went to the "best school"?
No. You can do the same thing to the whole genre of "Realty TV" that we consume and get the same contrived, staged, scripted, silly result.
If that's all it takes to show how a regime is oppressive, then we need to take a good close look at the same contrived undercurrents feeding into the media we consume and take for granted. There is nothing novel or unique to North Korea about the stage-directions that went into making this film. The only thing that's really different about this film is that it had lazier editing than the "Realty TV" we are used to.
Ultimately, this is a feel-good film built on orientalism.
We are not compelled to think about the very same contrivances that goes into the backstage of our own media productions. But a full-frontal coverage of the North Korean cinematic backstage is somehow fair game. We are not meant to question this. I have learned nothing about the lived realities attendant to the citizens of this country by the end of this film, but I was unwittingly fed copious amount of resources to help me exoticize and fetishize this country and its people.
And that seem to be what this film offers. It's not informative of its very subject-matter by any stretch of the imagination. But it does let us have a good laugh about it, all the while we pretend this is somehow radically different from our own media realities.
But what exactly am I supposed to feel about their situation through this kind of camera works? Pity? Contempt? Anger? Enlightenment? Amusement? Relief over how much better my life has been compared to their "Orwellian" one? I think I'm not the intended audience for this film because I just felt really manipulated.
The premise of this film is fairly simple. When you display both what's meant to go on screen and what's meant to be cut out, you demystify the magic of cinema, and reveals the inherently grotesque silliness of the stage directions inhabiting beneath the making of what was meant to be a moving grand narrative.
But what does that show us about North Korea? That they are oppressive and "Orwellian"? How? Because their cinematic productions are STAGED? Because their actors have SCRIPTED lines? Because they arbitrarily decide and change what scripted career the girl's father really have? Because they picked for a main character someone who happen to be well-off and went to the "best school"?
No. You can do the same thing to the whole genre of "Realty TV" that we consume and get the same contrived, staged, scripted, silly result.
If that's all it takes to show how a regime is oppressive, then we need to take a good close look at the same contrived undercurrents feeding into the media we consume and take for granted. There is nothing novel or unique to North Korea about the stage-directions that went into making this film. The only thing that's really different about this film is that it had lazier editing than the "Realty TV" we are used to.
Ultimately, this is a feel-good film built on orientalism.
We are not compelled to think about the very same contrivances that goes into the backstage of our own media productions. But a full-frontal coverage of the North Korean cinematic backstage is somehow fair game. We are not meant to question this. I have learned nothing about the lived realities attendant to the citizens of this country by the end of this film, but I was unwittingly fed copious amount of resources to help me exoticize and fetishize this country and its people.
And that seem to be what this film offers. It's not informative of its very subject-matter by any stretch of the imagination. But it does let us have a good laugh about it, all the while we pretend this is somehow radically different from our own media realities.