A fascinating look inside daily life in North Korea
Last week was the summer solstice, officially the longest day of the year. We are now on the downward slide, each day shorter than the last, as the season slips slowly behind us. That’s less time for beach trips and days by the pool, for late night fireflies and grilling out with friends. If you haven’t started on your summer reading, you’re definitely behind.
I finished my first book of the summer earlier this week, some light reading about the oppressive regime of North Korea entitled “Without You, There Is No Us” by Suki Kim. Kim spent two semesters teaching English at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, a school founded by evangelical Christians who are forbidden from discussing Christ, and was fully immersed in the everyday lives of the all-male student body, sons of the privileged North Korean elite.
The book is unsettling to say the least, but fascinating in a way that leaves the reader craving more stories from above the 38th parallel. As luck would have it, 2015’s Under the Sun, available on Netflix, is an exceptional companion to the book, as a well as a disturbing introduction to tightly controlled flow of information that is the source of power in the country.
The film is a documentary of a different sort, one that tells the truth in spite of several challenges presented. Originally meant to document a day in the life of a North Korean child, the documentary evolved into something quite different as the filmmakers encountered creative opposition at every turn.
After nearly two years of negotiations to be allowed to film in the country, Russian director Vitaly Mansky opens his film by stating: “The script of this film was assigned to us by the North Korean side. They also kindly provided us with an around-the-clock escort service, chose our filming locations and looked over all the footage we shot to make sure we did not make any mistakes in showing the life of a perfectly ordinary family in the best country in the world.”
In order to make the film, he had to follow their rules. But Mansky challenged this by leaving the camera on at all times and the soon the film became about what happened behind the scenes rather than the propaganda narrative that the regime hoped to create.
While those in charge wanted the world to see a young girl named Zin-mi become a member of the Children’s Union on Kim Jong-Il’s birthday, what the film shows are the machinations of the handlers, the terrifying conditioning of the North Korean mind, and the conspicuous poverty creeping around every corner.
Each scene in the documentary reveals more about the barely hidden nature of the country. The religious fervor surrounding the Il family is absolute and unquestioned, which is hard to reconcile for any audience that has experienced a free society. According to interviews, even Mansky, who was born into the former Soviet Union, was taken aback by the overwhelming control of the government.
The audience sees Zin-mi attend school, where she is taught a history lesson about Kim Il-sung throwing boulders at Japanese imperialists and landowners as they relaxed on a boat. The details of the story are recounted over and over, with the children in the classroom responding robotically and without critical thought.
We see Zin-mi struggle to remain awake during a lecture by an elderly general, hunched over from age and weight of the medals on his uniform, telling stories about American bombings and how the cowardly Americans targeted women and children.
We see scenes set in factories with workers dressed in clean, crisp uniforms congratulating each other on exceeding government quotas by 150 percent during one take and 200 percent during the next.
In each scene, we hear notes given by the handlers to the actors exhorting them to be more joyful or more patriotic. The truth holds no sway in the country, only the will of the party. And yet in spite of the artificial, the audience can’t help but notice the dark hallways, the empty streets, and imposing gray buildings.
Mansky raises questions about North Korea, but it’s not necessarily anything beyond what most already know about the country. However, while we watch the North Korean regime wag the dog to distract from the poverty in the background, Under the Sun leads to other thoughts, thoughts about our own country.
Much of what we see in the U.S. media is similarly, albeit more competently, produced. Is our reality any less constructed? Of course, it is. We are still a free society. But right now, there’s more than a simple difference in perspective being distributed from our top levels of government—there’s genuine misinformation on a wide variety of issues.
The distance between North Korea and the U.S. isn’t as great as it should be. The truth isn’t always what we’re shown and that should be as unsettling as anything found in this film.