Noord-Korea: Een dag uit het leven

This is a propaganda film, a medium that deserves contempt.

Though I may admire the cinematography and picture quality in "Triumph of the Will", the subject matter is so despicable that I must call it an awful film. This film is little better. It too is devoted to the cult of the Leader, and it too blames outside governments for its own faults.

Just because this film was made by a European film company does not qualify it as a "Gesamtkunstwerk". In no way does it transcend the political agenda of the North Korean government. Even as the NK Army sucks the blood from the people, they mouth endless platitudes for their Leader and blame all the starvation and misery on the capitalist Americans. Blah, Blah, Blah...

This film presents a North Korean family progressing through an 'average' day. There is no narration, but the filmmaker gives a point to the presentation through his use of film techniques and soundtrack. In order to get this sort of access, Mr. Fleury did have to make concessions to the DPRK government, and its clear that they are putting their best face forward here. However, there is a jarring dissonance between what they must think is their "best face" and what international viewers will probably see as a grim, claustrophobic, and stultifying life that can only be endured by projecting all life's miseries on the "bastard Americans". Best watched in conjunction with "A State of Mind".

This is clearly propaganda, but (unlike much of the genre) it doesn't stray into bad comedy from our viewpoint. By following a Pyongyang family through a "typical" day, it depicts North Korean life as hard-working, serious-minded, and humane. (Granted, the filmmaker never shows Kim Jong Il in anything but a positive light and never treats the fact that his likeness is EVERYWHERE as something suspicious.) It shows a nation of happy-well-adjusted people who seem content with the ways things are -- as is its the film's purpose. Fleury certainly had to cut a deal with the North Korean regime to even get it made, but he still discloses more about the place than the DPRK government would probably like, if they really knew what Westerners thought.