Film Review: “A State of Mind”
"A State of Mind" (2004) offers a rare and fascinating glimpse of everyday life in North Korea. British director Daniel Gordon got permission to shoot this documentary in Pyongyang after making a previous film in North Korea, “The Game of Their Lives,” in 2002. Ostensibly a sports story about two girls training for the 2003 national Mass Games—the North Korean equivalent of the World Series, Superbowl and Oscars rolled into one—“State” actually is a revealing portrait of the girls’ school lives, family lives, and belief systems in a country about which not much is known outside of the country.
The film shows how devoted the two girls, Pak Hyon-sun, 13, and Kim Song-yon, 11, are to their country and President Kim Jong Il. Only the most outstanding gymnasts are given the honor of performing before the Dear Leader, and the two girls set their sights on winning that honor.
“I long to perform for the general,” Hyon-sun says.
Hyon-sun practices with her classmates for hours on end, showing how invested these carefully selected athletes are in the games and, by extension, the ruling philosophy of self-sacrifice. With tens of thousands of dancers working together with synchronized precision, the Mass Games (Arirang) performance embodies the notion, considered crucial to North Korea’s survival, that individuals must completely submerge their desires into collective will of the nation. There are a number of "How did they do that?" moments.
The film’s most interesting moments occur in candid shots of the girls with their friends or families. At one dance practice, the teacher, after sternly instructing the girls how to position their bodies correctly, calls on one participant to sing. In front of the class, in a mock opera voice, the girl stalks back and forth theatrically. Then, as her classmates cheer and laugh, she leads them in a song praising Kim Jong Il. In a country where rote recitations of Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung's greatness are, let's just say highly encouraged--and those recitations are in the film--these moments are undeniably candid.
The interviews with Hyon-sun are also revealing. At one point, she recounts how she had previously skipped dance practices until she was caught by her teacher. She also talks about getting tired of the strict routine of daily practice. It is these moments of candor, these deviations from state ideology, that give the film authenticity.
Yet critics will note that the girls’ families are hardly typical. “Pyongyong is not representative of North Korea,” the narrator concedes. But we are given no sense of what the rest of North Korea is like. One cannot but wonder whether the two families we see were given extra rations of food and other household goods for the camera. Their high-rise apartments—with ample furnishings, televisions, rice cookers full of rice and many dishes of food—resemble less apartments in Pyongyang than Seoul. Though from the North Korean government's perspective, that's probably the point.
The directors had North Korean translators and guides with them at all times, and they claim they were never censored or controlled editorially. Given the government’s ultra-tight control of the media, however, it seems naive to believe the filmmakers were able to film any more than what North Korean officials selected for foreign viewing.
The film’s greatest achievement is the humanization of the two girls and their families. We see a strict father, proud of his three daughters, a pampering mother in whom her daughter confides her secrets, a tough grandmother and a grandfather who survived the brutality of the Korean War. Whatever their ideology, viewers will surely see these North Koreans as real people. Given the exceedingly narrow and ideological scope of most portrayals of North Korea in the media, that in itself is a major feat.