What Happens in North Korea, Stays in North KoreaI like to go to the cinema solo, to get out of my head and cease to exist for 90 minutes. I arrived just in time, slipped into the third row beside another loner, and prepared for my little ego-death ritual. Then a woman with a mic announced that the man beside me was, in fact, the director, Kim Bo-Sol, fresh off the plane from Seoul. I don’t know if you’ve ever had the experience of watching a film next to its creator, but it’s not exactly conducive to losing oneself. For the first few minutes, I was painfully aware of every breath, every shift in my seat, suppressing the urge to perform my reactions; little “mm”s of sympathy or furrowed brows of engagement. Then, mercifully, I forgot he was there.This is a film that plays with your perception of protagonist/antagonist. You might mistake one for the other and that’s by design. Borg’s ethics and effervescence have all the hallmarks of a hero, but in this regime he is a bull in a china shop; a reckless ignoramus born of privilege. MJ, the seeming antagonist, is merely a hostage of circumstance suppressing his humanity for so long that he is incensed by Borg’s naive invitations to do otherwise. Of course, the tendency to critique individuals for events totally misses the point. The antagonist is actually the regime; the systemic isolation permeating a palpably barren Pyongyang. In the Q&A, Kim explained that South Koreans are essentially the only people who can’t visit North Korea, so he and his team interviewed defectors and used the internet to build their best guess of Pyongyang. Yet this best guess will now permanently overwrite my mental image of North Korea. It’s strange how fiction can ossify into something that feels truer than reportage. Kim said he hopes that when (not if) the peninsula reunifies, North Koreans will tell him he got it right. That’s his dream.There was talk about parallels between North Korea and Ceaușescu’s Romania, which makes sense, but I kept thinking this film is as much about the future as the past. The days of condescending/derisive eye-rolling at Pyongyang are over; the dystopia isn’t confined by borders anymore.It’s such a grim depiction of North Korea. Especially considering Kim said South Korean media already distorts it for the worse, and that he tried to be fair. He also said the few moments of warmth (MJ’s fantasies of boozy camaraderie or the lovers’ reunion mid-fireworks) were added only after test screenings revealed the film was too bleak. I can see why. Without those flickers of fantasy, it might’ve been intolerable. I hope that North Korea continues to dream while we, on the outside, can fend off the nightmare.
