Under the Sun

The documentary follows a year in the life of a family in Pyongyang. Their daughter Zin-mi has been chosen to take part in one of the country's largest ceremonies and the family is inside that preparation. The father works at a factory, the mother at another job; the home is orderly, the table full, everyone content. But as the film proceeds something else becomes visible: every scene has a director. Officials standing outside the frame give the lines, correct the performance, make the family do the take again. The camera records those moments too. Vitaly Mansky directs. It is a Russian, German, Latvian and Czech co-production. The North Korean administration permitted the film and prepared the script itself; the officials accompanying the crew supervised each day's shooting. Mansky did not stop recording in the moments when the officials called cut; the footage shot between takes was carried out of the country and became the film's real material. North Korea objected once it was finished and moved to have it kept from screens. The matter it treats is how propaganda is produced; the film does not refute the propaganda, it shows the process of making it. The section where the young girl is tired and cries is its heaviest moment. Its limit is ethics; whether the family consented to these images being published is not known, and that argument continues. Who it is for: viewers who like political documentary and work that thinks about its own form. Who it is not for: it is slow, repetitive, and its method is contested.