A Film a Week - ...Ned, tassot, yossot

 previously published on Cineuropa

North Korea is probably the most closed-off country in the world, and the pieces of information (and art, likewise) that do come out of the territory first go through the filter of government censorship aligned with the national propaganda directed by the ruling communist party. The censorship has sometimes been surpassed in very clever ways, with Ugis Olte’s and Morten Traavik’s documentary musical Liberation Day (2016) and Vitaly Mansky’s Under the Sun (2015) being the most prominent examples.

However, before those two documentaries, there was Brigitte Weich’s Hana, dul, sed… (2009), her documentary about the four selected players from North Korea’s women’s football national team that won the Asian Cup two consecutive times and qualified for the World Cup. Its sequel ...ned, tassot, yossot... (both titles are actually a sequence of numbers in the Korean language) premiered last spring at Diagonale, before departing on a festival tour with stops at IDFA and Jeonju. It also competed in the Documentary Competition of the recently finished Sarajevo Film Festival.

Weich's new film follows the same four women, now ex-footballers that hold new positions in the North Korean women’s football landscape, either as coaches, national association executives or referees. The pretext for the new film was the screening of the previous one at the cinema at Taedong Gate for a select audience, but the filmmaker uses it to check on her protagonists from the film 5 years ago and to see how they are doing now. The answers are expected, all of them have married since, some of them have children… In the meantime, a fiction TV show was also made about the historical success of this generation of women footballers, and it was directed by Cha Suk, the only female director in the country, so she also becomes a protagonist in Weich's film.

As the film progresses, the subjects become more open about their lives and opinions, and so do the settings. At first, we see them at meetings at official buildings, supposedly closely monitored by government officials, but later on the locales seem more private and natural, and so do the conversations between the protagonists and the filmmaker. In the background of this group portrait, we also see the landscape of North Korea as it really is, with infrequent traffic on the streets, grandiose buildings, monuments and slogans coming from the quotes of the late leaders Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il on everything, from ideology to art. We can also see some more intimate details, such as the rituals imposed on children since the nursery age, the state of football fields and details about the nourishment of professional athletes.

Apart from inserting the younger of the leaders’ quotes into the film's fabric and translating every slogan on the street that get printed on the screen in handsomely designed titles, Weich also introduces her own commentary, juxtaposing the mix of interview portraits and observations regarding the landscape with the quick interludes of group art activities, such as playing instruments (accordions, cymbals) or ballet dancing to the sound of drums. Equipped with Barbara Seidler’s and Monika Willi’s rock-solid editing, those intermezzos highlight one of the points of the film: that it is all a directed-from-above, group effort in a heavily ideologised society, but there is still a narrow space for individual ambitions and acts.