A film director takes risks to film real life in North Korea

Vitaly Mansky is a Russian filmmaker and documentarian who has long been interested in life in North Korea. Like many other people, he is surprised by the fact that today it is possible to have a state similar to the one we see in 1984the dystopia created by writer George Orwell.

One day, Vitaly managed to meet some officials from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. After some time, they were offered to work on a film. Of course, Vitaly accepted, not to show the government’s vision, but to understand how the most closed country in the world really is.

O awesome.club became interested in the story of the film, which resulted in the documentary Under the sun🇧🇷

The North Korean government wanted to make a film to show the world an image of a happy family. They prepared a script about an 8-year-old girl from Piongyang preparing for the Day of the Sun, a party in honor of Kim Il-sung’s birthday. The authorities gave Vitaly Mansky the script and surrounded him with people who would check the film material daily.

The main character of Under the sun was given to little Zi-Min. She and her parents also received the script.

From then on, everyone began to perform a true spectacle of joy in front of the director. The main characters were taken from a one-room apartment near the train station to a luxurious house in the center of the capital. In reality, the house was just a set built on a cement surface. The closets were empty, no one used the bathroom, and the house didn’t even have a main entrance.

From a journalist in real life, the father became, in the film, an exemplary engineer. His wife was no longer a coffee shop employee; she went to work (so the story goes) in a soy milk factory. Even the family photographs were taken against a false background. But the exaggeration did not stop there. “All the inhabitants of Piongyang are part of an exhibition. For example, to keep the grass green, every day, at 6 am and after work, people can be seen crouching down cleaning the floor”, comments Vitaly.

If the government’s plan had worked, the documentary would have been a great advertisement. But the Russian director had a different idea…

In addition to the images recorded according to the script, the operator filmed much more. Everything that was false was recorded. Including what was happening outside the apartment and what was possible to see through the window (the team could not leave the house unsupervised). Every day, the cameraman complained of stomach problems and went to the bathroom to secretly copy material. The director and his team were always in a state of tension. They hid unofficial scenes and understood that if they were discovered, they would suffer tragic consequences.

A young American, for example, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for trying to take a poster with the image of the leader out of the country. However, no one suspected Vitaly. Finally, the scenes, which totaled 26 minutes, and the director’s critical comments turned into a documentary that was precisely what the government did not want: an anti-propaganda.

Vitaly confessed that, after his trip to North Korea, he was left with more questions than before shooting the film. “I had an idea about North Korea and I thought I would just record everything on the screen. After a few months, I was able to confirm that I don’t understand anything about how life works in that country”.

What most surprised the director was that people are anesthetized. They just don’t know they can live any other way. “I thought that was a system of terror and repression, and that everyone understood that. I once spoke with a tiger tamer. He explained to me that when one of these cats is assigned to the circus, from day one he is trained not to feel like a normal tiger. That is, he cannot know which animal it really is. So he grows, grows claws, teeth, whiskers, roars and jumps, but he has no idea he is a tiger. Same thing happens in the movie Under the sun🇧🇷 But with people”.

Check out some facts about North Korea that the director always mentions in his interviews:

Apart from the family portrayed in the film, Vitaly has not seen any other fathers or mothers walking down the street with their children. Some workers live in the factories themselves and some children spend the night at school. Men do military service for 10 years and are allowed to stay with their families for a few days during the Flower Festival. Also, they cannot be alone with their family members. They must always appear in public. People bring artificial flowers to the statues of leaders. Foreigners cannot ride the subway. The director was only allowed to cross two stations to shoot a necessary scene. Time was not enough and the authorities proposed that he go to another wagon, in the opposite direction. When Vitaly said he couldn’t shoot the same scene with other passengers, everyone had to move to the other car. Passengers got up quickly, went to the other ‘car’ and sat down in equivalent seats. “For me, that was very impactful. To this day it seems like it was a dream I lived”, recalls the director. On local television there are no news or advertisements. There are only 2 channels and interviews with the leaders and philosophy of the Juche government are broadcast all day. Newspapers have 3 parts: on the front page there is always a big picture of the leader. In the rest, smaller photos of other leaders and their achievements. In the end, in small print, the publications deal with world events, catastrophes, strikes and air accidents. There has never been a kiss in a North Korean movie.

“In the country, there are people who live the same way as their parents and grandparents. They don’t have any kind of information and don’t know that life can be different. They don’t even have Internet access. I don’t think they’re even afraid. The most horrible thing is that they are on a level beyond fear.”, sums up Vitally.

The film Under the sun not easy to watch. It brings strong images and a very complex and worrying reality. Do you think you’re ready to check it out?