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Film projects a new N. Korea

LATIKA PADGAONKAR

In a first of its kind documentary from North Korea — one of the world’s most isolated countries — French director-producer N.C. Heiken opens the door to a devastated and forlorn land that has been trying the international community’s patience in recent years over its nuclear programme. Which is perhaps the only reason why North Korea has sailed into our consciousness. For the rest, it is a forgotten and failed state. When it isn’t confrontationist, it is a backwater, plagued by floods and famine and governed by dictators. This is how little we know of it – or care.

But now comes a documentary that blows the lid off its secrets and lies and confirms our worst fears about wanton savagery and human rights abuse. The film, first shown at the Sundance Festival earlier this year, shows how the frightening demons of the country’s past continue to hold centre-stage, how its brutish Soviet-style propaganda machine is cranking away, and how the totalitarianism of the state remains intact. North Korea is an anachronism in the 21st century, and Kimjongilia (2009) tells us why.

Kimjongilia is the name of a flower, a hybrid begonia, bred for leader Kim Jong-Il’s 46th birthday (he was born in 1941 and is rumoured to be suffering from terminal cancer). It represents justice, wisdom, love and peace — a bitterly ironic title, for a people who knew none of it. The film is a series of interviews with a dozen or so North Koreans who, quite incredibly, escaped to the South and lived to tell their tale.

Brilliant but bleak, the film is, however, more than just interviews, although what emerges from the refugees’ stories is enough to rustle up images of Stalin’s Soviet land and Orwell’s 1984. It’s a list of indescribables: corruption, bribery, extensive famine, repression, brainwashing, surveillance and total control over every aspect of life, imprisonment, extreme torture, forced labour, public executions, concentration camps (who thought there were any after Stalin and Hitler, but North Korea has its own hidden gulags). People are jailed for knowing about the private lives of VIPs, about the lump in the Dear Leader’s neck, for spreading a newspaper on the ground with the Leader’s picture, for listening to South Korean radio or even for having a voice that sounds capitalist! Hiding food in camps or not working hard enough are good reasons for the firing squad to fire away before helpless family members.

Such are the personal stories of these escapes. Using a variety of techniques and musical scores (piano, viola, violin, cello and song), Heikin creates a moving and imaginative cinema. The tragic and grotesque story she tells is not one of talking heads alone. The heads themselves are sometimes framed as closeups, sometimes as fragmented and tight close-ups of eyes or lips, sometimes filling the screen, at other times filling half or a quarter of the screen, sometimes even blurring the image.

These she intercuts with a range of extraordinary shots: army orchestras, parades of vainglorious soldiers, performances, march pasts, salutes — a throwback to the Soviet-style shows on the Red Square — splendid and colourful celebratory spectacles and perfect gymnastics worthy of an Olympic opening, romantic landscapes full of flowers and dreams, clips from earlier films of young girls exulting at being where they were; black and white pictures of the divine Dear Leader and his father Kim Il-Sung, surrounded by happy faces and reverential bows, to whom families said grace before meals, their eyes moist with gratitude at the sacrifices he had made and the burden he was carrying. For they were superhuman, these leaders, they were Gods who could be here, there and everywhere at once.

Heiken weaves into her story satellite images of labour camp locations, graphics, kitschy paintings, landscapes, plays, animated graphics and a brief historical timeline. But by far the most artistic and poignant element is her inclusion of interpretative dance, part ballet, past traditional Korean (the director has been a student of dance) to enhance the image, to contradict it, to flow with it or to reinforce its bitterness.

Who is listening to the pleas of the North Koreans? No one, at least not unless such documentaries are shown in festivals. "We can’t see, listen, eat, smell, speak… (we are) bound by wires…" says a refugee. And it shows in the skeletal figures of the people. There was a time when they were told (ordered) to be happy with two meals. Many were reduced to selling their possessions, their homes; they resorted to eating grass, roots, barks, even mice to survive. Some assert that people have stopped working for twenty years. Soldiers, too, were malnourished, even as the Party ordered farmers to grow opium. Lakhs died of starvation. Those who fled were stunned to see what existed in the real world and to at last confront the world they left behind as one based on one big, unending lie.

Kimjongilia must be seen and heard to be believed. These stark, bold, sorrowful and indignant testimonies provided by artists, farmers, armymen and housewives finally half-open a door to a country the world has neglected and its dictators decimated.