Mansky’s minders, endeavoring to make a film that appeared to be a documentary, set up a fictional construct from the get-go. Their scenario centers on an eight-year-old girl named Lee Zin-mi, who lives with her parents in Pyongyang. All three characters are evidently as close to air-brushed ideals as real life would provide. Zin-mi is cute, bubbly and always happy. Her parents, perfect Communist workers, dote on their child and obviously enjoy the spotless apartment that has been provided them for the shoot.
With everything we see so beautiful, clean and bright, the fakery is blatant from the outset, and Mansky gleefully stresses it by including his minders’ off-camera instructions to their cast members. When we see the ideal factory where Zin-mi’s mom works and her team always far surpasses their quotas, the movie’s de facto directors urge the workers to express themselves “more joyfully!”
Likewise, there’s a scene where an aging soldier visits Zin-mi’s class and tells the kids about his actions during the Korean War fighting Americans, who, he dutifully recites, regularly hunted down and burned children. The class members, rather than seeming shocked or fascinated, hear this with expressions that feign interest, at least when the kids are not fighting to stay awake—footage the North Koreans surely would have eliminated if they’d had the chance.
In the same scene, the old warrior—who wears a jacket so full of medals it might have come from a Marx Brothers’ movie—isn’t allowed to finish his speech and depart in dignity. Three times, Mansky’s minders call for another take and instruct the guy to end his talk by urging the kids to join the Children’s Union, an outfit that apparently exists to lavish youthful adoration on the country’s dynastic rulers, including the late Kim Jong-il, whose heroic deeds as “the Great Leader” are praised throughout the film.
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