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.

A Film a Week - Liberation Day

Unlikely as it might seem, Laibach and North Korea are match made in heaven. Slovenian band was the first musical act from the West to perform in Pyongyang, mildly (or not so mildly) shocking both Western and Korean audiences on national holiday, the titular Liberation Day. The “pitch” to the Koreans was the idea that their country is being misunderstood (with the label of heavily militarized communist despotism) just like Laibach, a conceptual act which toying with different iconographies of dictatorship while having to deal with label “fascist”.

The man who made this strange cultural exchange happen was Morten Traavik, the Norwegian theatre director and provocateur who had previously dealt with both Laibach (he did a music video for them) and the North Koreans (he organized a tour for their national military choir in Norway, which was considered scandalous even in that open-minded Scandinavian country). He directed the show for which the audience reacted with genuine confusion and, with the help of the editor Ugis Olte, the documentary about the whole ordeal.

Just imagine the level of mistrust and miscommunication between the two worlds, one of them being extremely paranoid with all the “aparatchiks”, spies, secretaries, committee members and whatnot hanging around the band during the show preparations, trying to censor the whole thing (and usually succeeding). Laibach members, technicians and the whole entourage around them are not helping either: the frontman Milan Fras keeps wearing his “Nazi” hat even during the official photo-shooting, and the main ideologist Ivan “Jani” Novak almost caused the catastrophic incident by simply going for a walk, against the advise.

Naturally, the concert was also a strange compromise. First of all, the equipment in the hall is from the middle of last century. Also the music and the concept of Laibach is strange and even disturbing in the context of humourless North Korean society, so lots of last minute changes were being made, usually the things like projected videos and similar stuff. Maybe the craziest of all fuck-ups was the issue of the dialect: for one song, the band has translated some verses from German to Korean, but their pronunciation sounded suspiciously “southern”.

But the concert actually happened, and everybody involved was, well... satisfied. So, how about the audiences? In Slovenia at least, where the whole tour was covered in daily papers, an issue popped up just after the premiere: according to some critics, the film is neither about Laibach nor North Korea, but about Traavik himself, making it a publicity stunt. They have actually missed the point by a mile. It might not be about Laibach and Traavik might have made himself more important, but it definitely is about the parallel universe of North Korea. And in that universe every team has its leader, the one who is responsible. In the case of this particular show, that person was Traavik and it just shows how well he got the point about the North Korean culture. If it is not a shiny example of cultural exchange, I really do not know what would it be...