Not-so-nice North Korea: Part 3 – Under the Sun (2015)

October 7, 2016 | By

North Korea (aka the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or DPRK) remains a fascinating oddity because of its pariah status among the international community for its ongoing nuclear ambitions, and for being a rare example of a country controlled by a totalitarian dynastic family, applying Orwellian mechanisms to control its people from crib to grave, and the unending mystique of what it’s like living in a hand-crafted 1984.

Glimpses of its massive, Soviet-styled architecture and monuments, propaganda newsreels of heroic songs slapped over montages of its smiling leader, and tales of terror from citizens who defected / escaped add to the allure of a world trapped in its own bubble that has yet to burst, and may not, given it remains a potent force on the continent; it may lack the power of neighbouring China, but there’s no sign its regime is weakening and moving towards an open society.

North Korea’s film output rarely makes its way to North America – the Euro-DPRK co-production Comrade Goes Flying (2012) has yet to appear on video after premiering at TIFF and subsequent rare screenings – and any western news pieces on aspects of the country feature footage that must be approved by the government prior to release, making Vitaliy Manskiy’s Under the Sun (2015) unique: the director let his camera run before and after takes, showing government handlers directing the ‘ordinary family.’

What began as a co-production with full government approval turned into a risque venture that could’ve landed its director and crew in deep trouble, and it’s no wonder Manskiy has been branded an enemy of the state, as he recounts in the BBC interview archived on Icarus Films’ DVD.

It’s an amazing film for what’s rarely seen – elegantly composed shots of Pyongyang’s architecture, the innards of buildings, and even seeing distant glimpses of the massive Ryugyong Hotel, a bat-like monstrosity consisting of 105 floors of which construction began in 1987, froze in 1992 after funds ran dry, and whose construction restarted in 2008 with aide from an Egyptian telecom. It’s a grand hotel for international visitors and commerce in a country that trusts no one, especially foreigners. During its abandoned state, the building was no longer referenced in official media, even though its massive bulk and rotting concrete superstructure was impossible to miss.

I reviewed Manskiy’s prior film, Pipeline / Truba,when it premiered at Hot Docs 2014, and that work shares the same stylistic approach in Under the Sun: beautifully composed wide shots, and a fixation on small details revealing subtext that’s rarely stated by subjects or the director himself. Pipeline is available nowhere, and it’s a classic example of the mass of documentaries that premiere at festivals and then vanish… perhaps because most either don’t address sufficiently timely, hot button topics… or they just get lost among more recent sexier films in the large documentary marketplace.

Under the Sun’s locale and controversy guaranteed its distribution and availability, but it is unfortunate that little of Manskiy’s other work is available in North America.

As for other glimpses of North Korea, there’s really just YouTube which contains an archive in flux, with western and DPRK propaganda pieces appearing and disappearing, sometimes subtitled and sometimes not. It all adds to the mystique of the Hermit Kingdom, or the hermetically sealed oddity that is perhaps the world’s last remaining totalitarian regime in the classic Communist mold – brutal and immutable.

Also added from the KQEK.com archives is Comrades in Dreams (2006), Uli Gaulke’s fascinating doc on movie exhibition in four unique communities in India, Africa, America, and North Korea.

Coming next: a podcast interview with Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children composers Michael Higham and Matthew Margeson.

 

 

Mark R. Hasan, Editor
KQEK.com

 

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