Ordinary North Koreans are given a rare starring role

There is a depressing sameness to most of the reporting that escapes the suffocating seal clamped over North Korea. Too often, the Western correspondent, having wangled an elusive visa, kicks around the capital, Pyongyang, staring at the mysterious culture drifting past the hotel or taxi window. Resulting stories almost unfailingly mock the cult of personality surrounding leader Kim Jong Il and his father, Kim Il Sung, North Korea’s founder, who has been dead since 1994, with the reporter boasting that he or she is probably now disqualified from returning.

Just as well. Amid the steady drip of cliches -- “Stalinist theme park,” “economic basket case,” “Cold War relic” -- most tales from North Korea usually offer more detail on the reporter’s government-appointed minder (“poor Hyun couldn’t take his eyes off my Tag Heuer watch as he droned on about productivity growth”) than on the other 22.7 million North Koreans.

Which is reason enough to welcome British documentary maker Daniel Gordon’s “State of Mind,” 93 unblinking minutes of insight into the lives and mind-set of the people living in one of the last locked-down Communist dictatorships. Shot in 2003, the film gets its U.S. premiere at the fourth annual Tribeca Film Festival today (at the Prada flagship boutique, of all places).

It offers Americans an unusually intimate look at a people they know only through headlines as an enemy state with aspirations to build nuclear weapons that can hit California. And it is sure to come as news to Americans that North Koreans spend a wildly disproportionate amount of time thinking about them, primed to resist an invasion they believe is due any day.

They are unaware that most Americans, whom they blame for everything from chronic power blackouts to suppressing children’s laughter, probably couldn’t find North Korea on a map.

“State of Mind” shows the world through North Korean eyes, shining badly needed light on how the country has arrived at its current crossroads with the United States. Gordon follows two schoolgirls as they train to perform in the Mass Games, the regularly scheduled gymnastic and musical odes to the courage of Kim Jong Il (known as the General) in resisting American imperialism.

The Mass Games are precision extravaganzas and a metaphor for North Korea’s politics. Up to 80,000 gymnasts train daily for months to learn, as Gordon’s narration puts it, how to “surrender to the group ... thus becoming good Communists.”

Gordon’s entree to this closed world was through his filming partner Nick Bonner, a Beijing-based British citizen who has run dozens of tourist tours to North Korea since 1993, which have given him a view of the country beyond its cliches. For “State of Mind,” the pair tapped the trust they had built with the North Koreans through their 2002 documentary called “The Game of Their Lives.” That film tracked survivors of North Korea’s 1966 World Cup soccer team that shocked the world by beating soccer superpower Italy, 1-0, losing only in the quarterfinals.

The North Koreans loved “Game” and were happy to oblige Gordon when he came back looking for access to schoolgirls who perform in the Mass Games. They offered five to choose from. Gordon picked two, assuming all would come from carefully selected Communist families. He happily discovered that Pak Hyon Sun, 13, and Kim Song Yon, 11, were among the most talented young gymnasts, with families who eventually loosened up on camera.

“We demand an awful lot of the North Koreans when we go, and they constantly surprise us with the lengths they go to get us what we require,” Gordon said in a phone interview from Illinois, where he is shooting his next film, on American soldiers who defected to North Korea during the Cold War.

The now 32-year-old director shot the documentary over several visits, filming for more than 80 days. His camera captured a spectacle almost unknown in the West: a colorful, athletic and above all collective performance that makes the USC marching band’s choreography look like a few drummers and trumpeters out for a stroll at halftime.

The Mass Games is mass performance art. Early on, we see footage featuring a backdrop of 12,000 schoolchildren filling one side of an outdoor stadium, where they fold and unfold large booklets of colored pages on command. Together, the colors create spectacular mosaics of the Kims and Korean history. It is an extraordinary sight for anyone who has ever watched North American fans try to organize a simple wave.

But “State of Mind’s” real value lies in getting behind doors previously closed to Westerners. Gordon follows Hyon Sun and Song Yon (note these are personal names, not family names) from the moment they awake through their school day and then on to the grueling practices. Training makes huge demands on the girls’ time and nerves, but the regimen is expected to lead to perfect routines that will “give happiness to the General,” as Hyon Sun explains.

Yet Gordon’s camera adds a palette of color to a North Korea usually seen as a monochrome of concrete gray. We see a flash of shy pleasure from Song Yon when an older sibling moves out and a bedroom no longer has to be shared; we see daughters who lie to their fathers and share secrets with their mothers; we see girls on the cusp of teenage years dealing with pride and frustration and pain and impatience and fear.

We also get ushered into the North Korean home, where state radio is piped into every kitchen (it can be turned down but has no off switch) and Westerners have seldom set foot, let alone brought in cameras and microphones.

“We tried to stay in the background as much as a Western crew can in a North Korean apartment,” says Gordon, noting that the three-man crew that made the film sometimes dropped to two for interior shots. But once they grew accustomed to the cameras, the North Koreans seemed happy to talk. “State of Mind” includes a grandfather’s recollections of American bombings during the Korean War in the 1950s and a mother’s reminiscences of the deprivations during the famine of the 1990s, a period North Koreans call the “Arduous March,” when having a birthday meant getting a full bowl of corn porridge instead of a half-bowl. An estimated 2 million North Koreans died.

“You listen to the grandfather, and his only contact with Americans was the bombing,” Gordon says.

With North Korea closed to U.S. influences, there are no positive impressions to compete with the memories of fire and ash. The emerging generation is taught that the United States remains a clear and present danger. (“Where are the U.S. imperialists attacking at the moment?” the teacher asks. “Iraq,” the class answers in unison.)

Gordon screened “State of Mind” at the Pyongyang Film Festival last year and says North Korean audiences were mostly mystified by it.

“They didn’t find it that interesting because it just shows their daily life,” Gordon said. “The families still don’t understand why we would want to follow them around.”

But there were moments when the audience laughed, Gordon recalled.

“Like when the power goes out: That’s a part of daily life, but they are not used to seeing it on film,” he said.

“Normally movies show them the ideal rather than the real, so this was laughter of recognition. So they thought it was funny when the family was sitting in the dark. And when the family blames the ‘bloody Americans,’ well, they were rolling in the aisles.”