The Juche Idea

By T.R. Witcher

Wednesday, June 18, 2008 | 10:53 a.m.

Jim Finn’s strange new film plays as a sort of mockumentary about a South Korean activist (Lee) who joins an artists’ commune in North Korea, where she spends her days doing farm work and making revolutionary propaganda films based on, and in accordance with, Juche, that country’s state ideology.

Juche is a philosophy of self-reliance applied to the communist goals of the state. The Juche Idea mixes actual state propaganda films—bizarre shorts of the country’s smiling leader, Kim Jong Il, backed with deliriously syrupy music—with excerpts from the agitprop “films” made at the commune. There are some hilarious moments: an English-speaking tourist (who we understand is played by a “Russian” actor) notes to a North Korean official that he has intestinal distress and is looking for a bathroom, then a hospital—what better way for the official to launch into a short explication of the superior communist health-care system? A couple meet cute while shoveling duck dung, an amusing wedding of workers’ paradise and rom-com. And the film finishes with a clip from a sci-fi film about the last survivors of a germ-plagued world (no thanks, naturally, to the capitalists).

Few countries seem as utterly alien as contemporary North Korea, which the film’s sheer oddness manages to convey—until, that is, its hall-of-mirrors style becomes more baffling than illuminating.