Inside North Korea

The National Geographic reporter Lisa Ling enters North Korea posing as the coordinator of a medical team. She is watched throughout the trip; where she may look and whom she may speak to are settled in advance. The documentary looks at the country through that narrow opening and shows how far the state has settled into every corner of daily life, what people say, and the obstacles the aid workers run into. The fact that everything on screen is there by permission is also the film’s own limit; what we watch is not a country but as much of one as it chose to show. Jesse Gordon and Peter Yost directed the fifty two minute American production, completed in 2006.