BY KAREN BOSSICK
We can’t escape the images of “Rocket Man”—Kim Jong-il—and President Trump sparring on the evening news.
Now, the Sun Valley Center for the Arts is offering a chance to go behind the scenes of that Reality TV to get a real-life peek behind the curtain into the lives of an 8-year-old girl named Zin-mi and her family in North Korea.
The Center will present the feature-length documentary film, “Under the Sun,” at 7 p.m. tonight--Thursday, Sept. 28-- at the Magic Lantern Cinema in Ketchum. The first of The Center’s 2017-18 Film Series, it’s being shown as part of its current BIG IDEA project “The Unreliable Narrator.”
Russian director Vitaly Mansky is a Ukrainian-born filmmaker who has spent his career exploring how totalitarian states use propaganda to make the reality of life seem better than it is with such films. His films include the 2011 film “Motherland or Death,” an emotional look at daily life in Cuba.
He filmed “Under the Sun” after two years of negotiation with the North Korean government, in which he had to agree to the North Koreans writing the script and selecting the subjects and locations. What the government did not realize is that he kept filming even after film managers had shouted “Cut!”
In the process, Mansky depicts a young girl shouting allegiance to North Korea’s dictator and eating delicious food with her parents in their apartment in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang as she prepares to join the Children’s Union youth group on the Day of the Shinging Star, Kim Jong-il’s birthday.
But he also captures such scenes as that of uniformed workers being commanded to talk “joyfully” about how much they love their work producing soy milk.
The end result is “a surreal and sinister…real-life version of ‘The Truman Show,’” The Hollywood Reporter said, referring to the movie which revolves around an insurance adjuster who discovers his life is actually a TV show.
“In looking for a film that could get at the idea of an unreliable narrator, a film that focuses on North Korea seemed impossible to skip,” said Kristine Bretall, director of Performing Arts at The Center.
“With the Kim regime’s reliance on propaganda and media control, it was inevitable that the government would manipulate the documentary project to depict a fictional North Korea to show to the outside world. In the context of current events, the film allows us to peek behind the curtain and see what really happens inside North Korea.”
Tickets for the film, which is being screened during the Magic Lantern’s annual Fall Film Festival, are $10 for members of The Center and $12 for nonmembers, available at www.sunvalleycenter.org or by calling 208-726-9491.