Savoy Theatre is the 8-year-old daughter of ’just a regular family’ in North Korea, buy ’the best country in the world.’Vitaly Mansky, the renowned Russian documentary director, follows the everyday life of the family for a year. With the film being produced by the North Korean government, everything is of course completely staged: the family members are actors, the lines scripted and rehearsed over and over again. For Mansky, who grew up and became a documentarian during the era of Soviet propaganda, this is all too familiar.
Mansky flips the film on a meta-level, leaving the cameras rolling before and after the official scenes and shooting the mechanisms of building and maintaining the facades. The result is a study on total propaganda. The government aims to cut everything human out of the shots, but ever the alert observer, Mansky spots in the rituals brief moments when cracks appear in the facade, like when a child yawns during a ceremony.
Mansky, who visited DocPoint in 2015, manages again to bewilder – both the audience and the North Korean producers or the film.
Turkka Ylinen / Translation: Liina Härkönen
Language: Korean
Subtitles: English
- Director: Vitaly Mansky
- Country: Russia, Germany, Czech Republic, North Korea, Latvia
- Year: 2015
- Length: 106 min
- Age limit: S
- Format: DCP
- Cinematography: Alexandra Ivanova, Mikhail Gorobchuck
- Editing: Andrej Paperny
- Production: Natalia Manskaya/Vertov. Real Cinema, Filip Remunda/Hypermarket Film, Simone Baumann/Saxonia Entertainment, Vitaly Mansky/Vertov. Real Cinema
Showtimes:
- Cinema Sõprus: Saturday 30.01 - 14:00
- Cinema Sõprus: Sunday 31.01 - 12:00