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A Bad Review for ‘A State of Mind’

[Update: Yonhap reports that this year’s Arirang Festival has been cancelled. Scroll down for details.]

I haven’t seen the film, nor have I seen the promos for it, but this sounds like a fair criticism to me:

You know you’re looking at propaganda when you see a cute little white dog prancing through the apartment of the physicist father of 11-year-old Kim Song-yon – as if dogs come with the nice kitchen and furniture for middle-class North Koreans.

Or, judging from the straight-faced observation that “North Korea is divided into three classes – workers, peasants and intellectuals”, and all are treated equally, are we to believe that all North Koreans have cute little doggies, even those so driven by starvation that in truth they would die for a nice slab of dog meat?

Don Kirk, writing in the Asia Times, notes that the Discovery Channel gave it tons of publicity and a prime-time slot. I wonder why “Seoul Train” and “Abduction” (trailer / review / review) can’t get this kind of air play. I’ve really never considered useful idiots like the “Korean Friendship Association” losers to be any cause for undue alarm, but the producers of this film may leave plenty of viewers with a very distorted view about North Korea, just as plenty of views were once distorted by “Olympia” and “Triumph of the Will.”

Update:

“Pyongyang’s delegation to the United Nations informed us that Arirang festival will be resumed next spring,” Yoon Gil-sang, the leader of a pro-North Korean organization in the United States, the Korean American National Coordinating Council, told the Minjok Tongshin.

We have our own Chosen Soren right here? I think Jake Blues speaks for me on that one.

The festival was originally scheduled to run from Aug. 15 to mid-October. The North proposed last month that about 500 to 600 South Korean tourists travel to Pyongyang every day to see the festival.

Seoul agreed to allow South Korean juche fans to attend and spend their won on this propaganda festival just after North Korea launched its missiles and brought down the condemnation of the rest of the world.

But South Korean government officials said they have not received any notice from Pyongyang about the cancellation of the festival. But they feared that if the report is accurate, inter-Korean exchanges could be further reduced amid growing tension over the North’s recent missile tests.

Sadly, I have lost my capacity to be shocked by this sort of reaction from the South Korean government.

One wonders why the North Koreans really did this. The floods are in fact reported to have left thousands dead or homeless, aside from this:

The neighborhood of Pyongyang’s May Day Stadium, the venue of the Arirang mass gymnastics event, has also reportedly been severely destroyed by recent downpours.

Whatever “severely destroyed” means, and how easy the damage could be hidden, I won’t try to guess. Still, horrific things have been going on in North Korea for years, and they’ve never stopped the propaganda juggernaut’s biggest annual event. Another possible explanation is that their recent cash flow problems forced them to do this.

Another possibility: the North Koreans could see that they were taking a beating in the international press.
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7 Responses

  1. During the Chosun era and for that matter thruout history all over Asia, actor were placed in lowest wrung of the society. Only recently in last 100 years or less did this change.

    So who did actors most of them lack college degrees (acting major does not count) come out in drove to rally for? Of course NO and cronies at Uri. And chief cheerleader for noSHITmo was Myung the joke of actor.

    Hey guess who else is into movies! Dear MURDERER Kim! He is movie junky and wouldn’t surprised if he had commies agents infiltrated the movie industry.

    Summed up not suprising.

    PS – Not to mention that unless Hollywood – most Korean actress have shady 2nd job with sugar daddies.

  2. Fair comment by Don Kirk. Same can be said for ‘the Games of their Lives’ which is in effect also a propoganda movie – made by the same company. This would make one not having too much expectation of the forthcoming release of ‘Crossing the Line’ which actually should have been released by now.

    With regards to our good friends of the KFA : a recent movie called ‘Friends of Kim’ deals the final blow to this absurd organization although it seems that the online community had already discredited Cao and his supporters long time ago.

  3. I’ve seen “A State of Mind” and felt that the point of the movie was well preserved. It shows the lives of the two sisters who are gymnasts, and how much they will sacrifice just to please the great leader. It also shows the required announcement radios and tv with propaganda cartoons, in the apartment of these two girls. The parents seem hardworking and privileged – they live in pyongyang – and so just the fact that they have a dog isn’t something to discredit the whole film for. I met a girl who just came out months ago and she said she ate as well in NK as she does in China, so its not like they don’t have food, dogs, and shiny cars for the privileged. The point is, it does show that the girls and the family are brain washed, hence “A State of Mind”

  5. In my opinion, State of Mind is as good as it gets with regard to NK documentaries. It simply reports, and leaves the interpretation up to the audience. The camera work is subtle, and the impression one comes away with depends on one’s perspective. It’s clever, it’s insightful and it’s free of political or ideological bias – insofar as that is possible with NK. I came away from watching it even more concerned about the level of brainwashing inside NK… Watch it and make up your own minds.

  6. I strongly ‘second’ these last several comments.

    The film is EXACTLY what it purports to be:

    ‘… an observational documentary film following two North Korean schoolgirls and their families in the lead up to the Mass Games – the largest and most elaborate human performance on earth.”

    It is NOT, nor was it advertised as being, and I believe it would be somewhat naive to expect it to be, an expose of the true horrors of the dark side of the Kim Jong-il regime (as found in the ‘re-education’ camps like Yoduk). The film’s depiction of the effects of two generations of incessant thought-control is frightening in its own right.

    I was quite pleased with the quality of the filming and the professionalism exhibited in its production by VeryMuchSo.

    Note: VeryMuchSo Productions was selling only the PAL version of the DVD at the time that I purchased it, meaning that it played ok on the PC/monitor but not on an NTSC-based player/TV.