[top photo: A group of North Korean girls practicing for mass games outside the Kim II Sung stadium.]
By Boon Chan, Media Correspondent
When producer Nicholas Bonner showed his documentary, A State Of Mind, to North Koreans, they said it was boring because it was just like real life.
Nicholas Bonner.
"To me, that's the biggest stamp of approval," says the Briton over the telephone from Beijing, where his travel agency, Koryo Tours, is based. He will be in town on Thursday and Friday for the two screenings of his film at Sinema Old School in Mount Sophia to conduct question-and-answer sessions.
The documentary, written and directed by Briton Daniel Gordon, offers a glimpse into the lives of 13-year-old Pak Hyon Sun and 11-year-old Kim Song Yun as they undergo training in order to get a shot at taking part in Pyongyang's 2003 mass games, a display of precisely choreographed gymnastics on an enormous scale.
Bonner says the film-makers still keep in touch with the girls and that Pak performed in the mass games last year while Kim is now in cooking school.
The 47-year-old producer had unprecedented access to the girls and their families because he had been involved in other documentary films about the secretive North Korean state tightly controlled by Kim Jong Il's communist regime.
Bonner says: "We've never been in a situation where the Koreans have said "Let's see your film footage." People find that very hard to fathom, that we weren't under more scrutiny."
He attributes this to the trust built from the first film they did. The Game Of Their Lives (2002) was about the famed North Korean football team that made it to the quarter-finals of the 1966 World Cup.
He notes that there is a lot of misunderstanding about the country and its people, which he hopes his films will help redress. "It is extremely misplaced to say that they are all controlled and they are not individuals; of course they are. You do follow the system but there is an enormous amount of freedom for individuals within that."
Some of the interviews bear out his conclusion, as he points out: "Hyon Sun says that "I didn't want to be part of a group as a kid" and this is the most remarkable thing I think that she said. Then the system comes in with mass games where she learns to be part of a group."
He adds that, in a way, this disjunction between Western perception and North Korean reality prompted the documentary: "My friends had taken part in mass games as kids, and the attitude in the West is that they have no individuality and people don't enjoy doing it, but I knew it differently.
After A State Of Mind, Bonner co-produced Gordon's Crossing The Line (2006), which portrays the lives of two American soldiers who defected to North Korea in the 1960s.
The producer has taken a long and winding path to North Korea. He went to China in 1993 to study urban architecture but ended up specialising in one of the most isolated and least understood countries in the world.
He changed the subject of his study because the buildings he was interested in were being destroyed. But he met a North Korean while playing football and was subsequently invited to lead a small group of visitors to the country.
He found it fascinating, got to know more North Koreans, and this led to him setting up the travel agency that same year. With his experiences in the secretive country, he came to be involved in documentary films about it.
He is currently working on a romantic comedy with a North Korean cast and crew. "It's the story of a girl who wants to become a trapeze artist and there are lots of mistaken identities."
As for the reaction he has received for his films, he says: "Some people come out and say our films are propaganda for North Korea and others say "Wow, you're showing the real truth behind this country and it's frightening, isn't it?" You get both and I think that's lovely."
bchan@sph.com.sg
book it
A STATE OF MIND
Where: Sinema Old School, 11B Mount Sophia When: Thursday and Friday, 8pm. There will be a Q&A session with associate producer Nicholas Bonner after both screenings. Admission: $10, e-mail love@sinema.sg or call 6336-9707.
