E-Mail This Article to a Friend State secrets North Korea on film BY GERALD PEARY
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"For the first time ever, North Korea, the secret state, has revealed itself to outsiders," brags the voiceover of A State of Mind, which opens this Friday at the Coolidge Corner Theatre. Written and directed by Daniel Gordon, this BBC documentary takes you where you surely have not ventured before, into the streets, the schools, the private residences of those living in Pyongyang, North Korea. It’s amazing to be transported there, the capital city of that perplexing, alien country that’s been our official enemy since the early 1950s and the Korean War, the country George W. has infamously branded as part of an "Axis of Evil."

How did this Western crew get access to the most paranoid and cut-off country on earth, the only nation that closed borders to every kind of transportation — trains, planes, automobiles — during the SARS scare? A country for which George Orwell’s 1984 seems, without irony, a blueprint of urban planning? (Big Brother is personified by North Korea’s Supreme Leader, Kim Jong Il, whose image is ubiquitous, and who is worshipped as a god-on-earth by the North Korean people.) Gordon somehow managed to convince the North Korean bureaucracy that he of the myriad of potential documentarians would be the one to make a fair-minded, judicious film about their country. And that’s what he’s done, though at the price of self-censorship.

Orwell is never mentioned. There’s nothing in the film about the nuclear build-up, North Korean prisons, the lack of civil liberties, or the other obvious sore points in this hyper-Stalinist Communist state. Gordon does bring up the most notorious horror, the fact that many North Koreans — hundreds of thousands? — starved to death when during a severe famine their President for Life decided against foreign assistance. Yet he stops short of blaming anyone. Things are better now, someone says. Kim Jong Il carries on.

A State of Mind concentrates on two adolescent female gymnasts who are training for the Mass Games, a socialist-realist extravaganza, a kitsch Olympic Games. Thousands of North Koreans do synchronized athletics in honor of Kim Jong Il, in the desperate hope that their reclusive leader will come to watch them perform. Gordon take us to see the girls’ rigorous training; he also follows them to school, and home.

Why are these North Korean children studying English? That’s a mystery: it’s not as if they’d be allowed to travel abroad! And how did their teacher, a 40ish woman with Anaïs Nin eyeliner, learn English herself?

We move on to a more rigid class, one in Marxist ideology. Who do you think is the big enemy of North Koreans? We are! Americans! "They are maneuvering to stop our happy laughter," the citizenry is taught. Also that the American government is scheming to attack Pyongyang. "We have to endlessly hate the US," someone explains.

The two gymnasts live in squat apartments in high-rise buildings, with too many relatives in too few rooms — but that could happen in any country. As highly ranked athletes, the girls have far better domiciles than regular North Koreans. That’s why their domestic life seems so familiar to Westerners, with parents insisting that homework be finished before their daughter can watch TV cartoons. Then it’s off to bed, before the Orwell dawn: at 7 am, the Workers’ Siren screams "Get Up!" across Pyongyang.