City Nomads’ Documentary Of The Month: ‘Under The Sun’
PUBLISHED May 19th, 2018 10:51 am | UPDATED June 3rd, 2020 12:15 am
At a time where hopes for a relatively amicable – and by that, we mean not bat crazy hostile – North Korea and South Korea relations are at an all time high, or at least, seems almost plausible, it’s essential to take a step back and look at the current situation of the Juche socialist state. And ‘Under the Sun’, the harrowing documentary produced by veteran Russian filmmaker Vitaly Mansky, is your ticket in.
You might think that the 2015 film, like the mass of manipulated information that leaves the country, would be largely propaganda. And it was intended to be – the action is fake, the dialogue is scripted, and the documentary was casted by the North Korean government. “Comrades, today our workshop beat the government quota with 150 percent!”, a manager announces at the garment factory.
But the real treasures are not the strictly directed and curated scenes, but the secretly-recorded details in between every take. ‘Under the Sun’ is the result of years Mansky, who in an unprecedented move, was invited to be an official ‘production partner’ of the DPRK after years of bargaining on the director’s part. Unknown to them, Mansky is no stranger to filming under intensely constrained situations, having made documentaries in an army camp, prison, and once, inside the Kremlin.
Employing the techniques of undercover journalism, he left his cameras running the entire day and used two memory cards. At the end of each day, a crew member would create a distraction and another would copy it in secret before handing over the original to the censors. “There is just the creation of an image of the myth of a real life. So we made a film about fake reality.”
Mansky’s documentary centres around an eight-year-old Pyongyang resident named Zin-mi and her family. Her mother works in a soy milk plant, and her father is an engineer at a garment factory (in reality, they are a journalist and cafeteria worker) while she prepares to join the Korean Children’s Union, a group likened to the Hitler Youth of Nazi Germany.
As a result of Mansky’s careful subversiveness, we watch every scene being set up, rehearsed, and reshot as a government official manages them through every detail, whether it’s a group of students listening to a drawn-out history lesson from a military commander, or workers forced to show more enthusiasm at the soy milk plant. And behind Zin-mi’s spring-loaded spiels of nationalistic pride and support towards the Great Comrade, we see a little girl struggling with her emotions to keep up appearances of what is clearly not her reality, fat tears rolling down her face. “Don’t act like you’re acting in a movie,” she is scolded at one point. “Act naturally, like you do at home.”
No officials are interviewed throughout the film, and it is not necessary. Because the occasional glimpses of real life – citizens taking the subway home or bicyling to work – are clear evidences of North Korea’s authoritative personality and dreary sentiments of despair and lifelessness. Combine that with Karlis Ausans’ austere score and it’s near impossible to not feel for the state of the country.
‘Under The Sun’ can be viewed on Netflix.
