Kimjongilia
France/USA/South Korea (2008)
Director: NC Heikin
Capsule review by: Charlie Prince

Director NC Heikin was inspired to make Kimjongilia after hearing horror stories at a conference she had attended with her husband on human rights. She weaves together interviews of former North Korean citizens who have successfully escaped Kim Jong Il’s regime. Their stories capture a horrific panorama of torture, extreme hunger, corruption and an astonishingly rigorous amount of brainwashing. The millions of reasons for which one can be locked up are startling: one girl explains that she was locked up because her best friend became Kim Jong Il’s girlfriend, and so apparently they locked up anyone who knew the girl for “knowing too much”. To make matters worse, when someone is found guilty of a crime, they punish for “three generations”, meaning that if your grandfather was arrested for something, you and your father would be too. This all the feeds the state’s dependency on products that are produced involuntary by inmates in widespread prison camps.

As one of the most isolated countries in the world, North Korea has not been the subject of many documentaries (North Korea: A Day in the Life being a noteworthy exception). Because the film is based on the anecdotes of random escapees, it is not so much an overview of North Korea’s history (though they do go through a rough timeline), but instead it picks out an array of outrageous events, which are very effective in touching the audience. It was particularly interesting to hear their accounts of the shock they experienced when they reached the outside world and discovered how much of what they had grown up believing was a lie. The film had such a big impact on the audience, that during the Q&A following the film, there were almost no questions about the film, instead everyone simply wanted to know “What can I do to help?”

I was similarly impressed, and I, too, wondered what website I might turn to learn more and possibly contribute somehow. But aside from the subject matter, the film was crafted imaginatively. The film’s b-roll was especially interesting, in which Heinin uses an expressive, interpretive dance to convey certain emotions and illustrate certain anecdotes. I’ve seen reenactments and cartoons and other animation in docs before, but never interpretive dance. Sometimes the dance shows up as the whole screen, sometimes its shown in split screen, or even in quad-screen. Because many of the speakers appear anonymously, the director used creative ways to frame them — only seeing their mouth speak, or just an eye, or showing their face blacked out but framed so that the picture is just a slit of what we can see on-screen. She mixes it up as she goes, and its all pretty interesting.

The actual term Kimjongilia was something that was created (to name a flower) in honor of Kim Jong Il’s 46th birthday. The grandiose footage from that event and other state-celebration events come across as glaring failures of government when contrasted with the food shortages that followed in North Korea after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. And it appears that this situation both continues to this day and is not expected to get any better, in part because, as several of the escapees explained, the brainwashing is effective. They genuinely believed that the Kim family were essentially gods, with the power to fly and do all sorts of supernatural events.

Kimjongilia is a film that really needs to be seen to be believed, and, while no distribution plans were in place as of today’s screening, I hope as many people see it as soon as it becomes available and as soon as possible.

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Sergio
USA (2008)
Director: Greg Barker
Capsule review by: Charlie Prince

Based on the book Chasing the Flame by Samantha Power, Sergio is a powerful documentary about the tragic death of one of the UN’s most respected and accomplished diplomats. Or at least that’s how Sergio Vieira de Mello comes across in the film, which in fairness is mostly described in the words of his fiance and friends. But while this might normally undermine the credibility of the testimonials, here his friends include top political figures of every stripe, as we listen to glowing statements about the man from Kofi Annan, Tony Blair, Paul Bremer and Condoleeza Rice.

Sergio ultimately died at the hands of al-Qaeda. Angry about Sergio’s successful midwifing of East Timor from Indonesia — the largest Muslim country in the world, al-Qaeda bombed the UN Headquarters building in Iraq. The blast was specifically targeted to impact right below Sergio’s office, leveling the building. Sergio wasn’t killed immediately, but was found buried deep under the rubble — alive but pinned down and very hard to get to. The film is structured around this terrible event, opening with the blast and ending on the inevitable result, with flashbacks to particular events throughout Sergio’s incredible, storied career as one of the UN’s top diplomats in the world’s most dangerous places.

Two interesting threads emerge as the film progresses. We are returned periodically to the scene of the blast, where two US soldiers are working desperately to extract Sergio from the rubble. This thread of the film is interesting but is dragged out for much longer than necessary. As the film keeps returning to this scene, I can only guess this was done with the idea that it might create “edge-of-your-seat” suspense as to whether or not Sergio would survive, which struck me as a little bit odd since it was obvious from the beginning that he had not survived the blast (hint: everyone is talking about him in the past tense and crying). This section of the film also entertains some finger-pointing, whether the US military acted too slowly in helping Sergio, why they pulled another guy out first, why the US military didn’t have materials to brace the walls, etc. It’s all mildly interesting, but seems a little bit petty considering everything the two soldiers had to go through in their titanic efforts (without going into too much detail, suffice it to say that they were required to perform gruesome tasks that would psychologically destroy most people).

The other thread follows Sergio’s background and personal life, and I found this much more interesting. He was a bit of a womanizer, but he also pulled out of a magic hat some of the most audacious, successful resolutions of impossible problems in the UN’s history. He raised eyebrows within the UN by agreeing to meet with and negotiate with some of the world’s most dangerous characters — the kind of people that his colleagues at the UN thought should be rounded up for war crimes — but his methods worked and he quickly became a “go to guy” for governments around the world when enormous problems arose. Hearing about his strategy and his unflappable personality was fascinating and was more than enough to win me over as a fan of the documentary.