That was an excellent one.

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Absolutely brilliant

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

Greetings again from the darkness. There is an old episode of "The Twilight Zone" that has always stuck with me. It starred Bill Mumy (who later became well known as Will Robinson in "Lost in Space") as a young boy with God-like mental and telekinetic powers. The entire town was afraid of him, so they constantly acted in ways to make him believe they were happy and appreciated him. Memories of that show came rushing back as I watched this documentary from Russian director Vitaly Manskiy. We outsiders know little about life in North Korea (it's known as 'the Hermit Kingdom'), though the film seems to confirm what we've been led to believe: it's a country filled with citizens either living in fear or living with acceptance of their plight (or both).Director Manskiy was contracted to make a movie about daily life of an ordinary family in Pyongyang. Two "escorts" were assigned to him, a state-sponsored script was provided, and his footage was reviewed daily. When the project was dissolved, Manskiy assembled the pieces … and added the secretly saved snippets from when he kept the cameras rolling between takes. The result is a documentary on the attempts of a Communist government to stage an illusion of perfection. It comes off as a foolish propaganda effort to convince the world that North Koreans are a happy people. What we see on screen convinces us otherwise.At the center of all this is 8 year old Zin-mi and her family. If you thought The Monkees were a pre-fab TV version of The Beatles, this shows what true manipulation is all about. Zin-mi's parents are given new jobs for the movie version. Rather than a print journalist, her father is given a job as an executive at a garment factory; and rather than a cafeteria worker, her mother is presented as working at a soy milk factory. Additionally, the family is moved into a nice apartment and then provided with meal time conversation, and even told where and how to sit and stand.Zin-mi has joined the Children's Union and the whole community is preparing for Day of the Shining Star – the national holiday celebrating the birthday of Kim Jong-Il; keeping alive the memory of their supreme leader who died in 2011. During these preparations, we see the clean streets and no-frills buildings, as well as the brainwashing that occurs during presentations and classes … the Japanese are labeled scoundrels, while Americans are cowards. The lingering images, and faces of those posing for photos, can't mask the emptiness of the individuals.The film reinforces more than enlightens, and it's more a rare snapshot of this society than a global perspective. Still, we can't help but feel saddened for the people as their lines are fed to them with directions like, that was "too gloomy", and, do it again with "joy". No proof of the brutal regime is presented, but it's obvious freedom of thought is not encouraged. The correlation becomes all the more ironic when it's recalled that the title of that Twilight Zone episode was "It's a Good Life".

Many people who come to North Korea for the first time directly publish what they see as film, comic or book. Most of them have almost no knowledge about North Korea other than commonly known through the media image in the western hemisphere. This documentary varies from the standard tourist program that most undergo by combining it with a story of the life of a 9-year-old girl which was filmed at three short visits within one year.Like many documentaries on North Korea it was produced in cooperation with a North Korean film agency. The whole attitude of this film makes me feel ashamed of watching it: As soon as the director gets the proposed script, he sees it as imposed on him. What follows is a bunch of outtakes and rehearsal scenes with melancholic violin and piano music, which should depict the evil nature of the state and the pitiful condition of society. The disobedience against the arrangements and directions of the North Korean partners is more like a 14-year-old smoking secretly than something helpful for understanding North Korea. Therefore I would rather recommend anyone attempting to watch this to switch to "My Brothers and Sisters in the North" (Sung Hyung Cho, 2016), because it gives a broader view into North Korean reality (if you are able to deduce within the lines), because it also shows that one can always negotiate with the North Korean film partners and even change interview partners on the set and film without anyone else present.The documentary seems to expect North Korean people to act like robots and that it what is gets by exactly fulfilling a plot which homages the state's narrative. It's hard to see how this documentary does not take the people in front of the camera as humans by using them for the agenda of this film and secretly filming them without consent. Everything in this film is set up because that's what's expected from North Korea. This documentary is not an improvement to the whole lot of single-story North Korea films and totally falls in the category of North Korea documentaries which are meta-parodied by "The Red Chapel" (Mads Brügger, 2009), because there the director Mads Brügger also stays in his own mindset of revealing-the-stage-play while Jacob Nossell finds a human level of interaction with the people he encounters.

This would be a great documentary if permitted so by North Korea. However, movies transfer emotions from the location or situation to a person watching it. As my summary says, it did it perfectly. We cant really see what is happening inside North Korea and how people live their every day lives but this certainly gives an idea how it may be in reality. It still leaves a great deal of details to our imagination but certainly gives us a hint.I will not comment or review this piece from a technical point of view as I could not focus on this part watching this. What we need to focus on, are certain aspects of life in North Korea and this staged documentary surely gives us an overview. You end up feeling upset, angry and at the same time heartbroken and in tears. Filmmakers deserve thumbs up for trying to achieve the impossible and they did the best from what they have been permitted to get and still came out of country all together and alive.

A foreign crew is somehow given permission to shoot in North Korea. The term "documentary" is a bit far-fetch here, since everything is actually staged by an escort crew that supervises, scripts, directs and rehearses every scene being filmed.If you want to see what George Orwell's NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR would look like if it became real life, watch this documentary.Watching it, I got strong vibes of movies such as EQUILIBRIUM, METROPOLIS, SLEEPER and THE PRISONER. Basically, every movie which depicts life in a state of dictatorship becomes a reality here and Orwell's book is the bible. All the elements from his book can be found here: Pictures of the leader at every corner, a constant state of war with military at every corner and as the center of every class in school, brainwashing the minds of people since an early age and basically turning them into human robots that would obey everything they are being told to do and learning how to hate the Japanese and Americans, production is always told to be getting "more efficient", TV constantly broadcasts programs about the leader, his military and war, and you hardly see anyone smiling.This is life in a constant state of fear and it's a living nightmare.The movie is far from perfect – many scenes are way too long and repetitive, tighter editing could have made wonders here – but its value lies in the achievement of showing a surreal regime that is almost impossible to believe that still exists in the 21st century and showing how "reality" can easily be fabricated.Good cinematography and excellent musical cues by Karlis Auzans.6.5/10 Highly recommended