Many people who come to North Korea for the first time directly publish what they see as film, comic or book. Most of them have almost no knowledge about North Korea other than commonly known through the media image in the western hemisphere. This documentary varies from the standard tourist program that most undergo by combining it with a story of the life of a 9-year-old girl which was filmed at three short visits within one year.
Like many documentaries on North Korea it was produced in cooperation with a North Korean film agency. The whole attitude of this film makes me feel ashamed of watching it: As soon as the director gets the proposed script, he sees it as imposed on him. What follows is a bunch of outtakes and rehearsal scenes with melancholic violin and piano music, which should depict the evil nature of the state and the pitiful condition of society. The disobedience against the arrangements and directions of the North Korean partners is more like a 14-year-old smoking secretly than something helpful for understanding North Korea. Therefore I would rather recommend anyone attempting to watch this to switch to "My Brothers and Sisters in the North" (Sung Hyung Cho, 2016), because it gives a broader view into North Korean reality (if you are able to deduce within the lines), because it also shows that one can always negotiate with the North Korean film partners and even change interview partners on the set and film without anyone else present.
The documentary seems to expect North Korean people to act like robots and that it what is gets by exactly fulfilling a plot which homages the state's narrative. It's hard to see how this documentary does not take the people in front of the camera as humans by using them for the agenda of this film and secretly filming them without consent. Everything in this film is set up because that's what's expected from North Korea. This documentary is not an improvement to the whole lot of single-story North Korea films and totally falls in the category of North Korea documentaries which are meta-parodied by "The Red Chapel" (Mads Brügger, 2009), because there the director Mads Brügger also stays in his own mindset of revealing-the-stage-play while Jacob Nossell finds a human level of interaction with the people he encounters.
Like many documentaries on North Korea it was produced in cooperation with a North Korean film agency. The whole attitude of this film makes me feel ashamed of watching it: As soon as the director gets the proposed script, he sees it as imposed on him. What follows is a bunch of outtakes and rehearsal scenes with melancholic violin and piano music, which should depict the evil nature of the state and the pitiful condition of society. The disobedience against the arrangements and directions of the North Korean partners is more like a 14-year-old smoking secretly than something helpful for understanding North Korea. Therefore I would rather recommend anyone attempting to watch this to switch to "My Brothers and Sisters in the North" (Sung Hyung Cho, 2016), because it gives a broader view into North Korean reality (if you are able to deduce within the lines), because it also shows that one can always negotiate with the North Korean film partners and even change interview partners on the set and film without anyone else present.
The documentary seems to expect North Korean people to act like robots and that it what is gets by exactly fulfilling a plot which homages the state's narrative. It's hard to see how this documentary does not take the people in front of the camera as humans by using them for the agenda of this film and secretly filming them without consent. Everything in this film is set up because that's what's expected from North Korea. This documentary is not an improvement to the whole lot of single-story North Korea films and totally falls in the category of North Korea documentaries which are meta-parodied by "The Red Chapel" (Mads Brügger, 2009), because there the director Mads Brügger also stays in his own mindset of revealing-the-stage-play while Jacob Nossell finds a human level of interaction with the people he encounters.