The Marmot’s Hole

By SHELTON BUMGARNER
Marmot’s Hole Guest Blogger

The Boston Globe has an insightful review of the 2004 documentary “A State of Mind.”

Each year [Pyongyang] hosts the Mass Games, a sort of epic three-day pageant of gymnastics, music, and placard flipping that suggests what Busby Berkeley might have come up with if he’d been hired to choreograph the Nuremberg Rally. ”A State of Mind” zooms in on two young girls practicing for the 2003 Games, but it quickly ducks under that thematic wire to offer fuller portraits of their lives and families.

[...]

The girls, of course, consider Kim Jong Il their spiritual father. Song Yun goes so far as to say, ”Other kids get to play in the bright sunlight, but we train to perform in front of our dear General.” When the Games finally arrive — and they are an epic display of state kitsch — the two wait in vain for Kim himself to attend one of the shows. He never does, but the notion of a Kafkaesque void at the top is lost on the subjects. ”A State of Mind” implicitly insists we can only truly understand what we can see for ourselves, and that goes for the West’s view of North Korea as well as the girls’ view of their dictator.

Be sure to read the rest on your own.