A State Of Mind explores the lives of two young girls as they train for what they consider the biggest event of their lives – performing for their ruler, Kim Jong Il, at the socialist spectacular that is North Korea's Mass Games.

It introduces the culture of a little known country with the poverty that its citizens endure with smiles and songs in front of the documentary maker's camera.

While Kim Jong Il, known in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea as The General, never makes a personal appearance in the film, his presence is overwhelming. Pak Hyon-Sun (13) and Kim Song-Yon (11) devote themselves to synchronised gymnastic perfection for him.

"I long for the day when I perform for The General, so I tolerate the pain," says Pak. It is a sentiment echoed throughout A State Of Mind.

The film takes us to the homes of the girls' families. Both are two bedroom apartments in central Pyongyang, an area that is reserved for the most highly regarded citizens.

Each person is rationed one chicken and five eggs per month says the narrative as the camera wanders through the spartan spaces.

Pak lives with two grand parents who sleep on the living room floor, as well as her parents. Kim shares her small bedroom with two sisters.

Each household has a radio that can be turned down but never turned off, and Pak's family has been gifted a television from the state that only carries one channel airing propaganda films and news for six hours a day.

Nothing can shake Pak and Kim's conditioned belief in The General. Singing and the girls' performance brighten their families' meagre lives, with every lyric, movement, and note in tribute to North Korea's communist ideology – the Jusche Idea.

Individual personalities are not captured beyond Pak's serious determination and Kim's cheerful childishness – the countries enforced character drowns them.

This destruction of individuality can result in beauty.

The footage of the Mass Games is stunning. Up to 80,000 gymnasts perform routines in near synchrony against the back drop of the biggest picture in the world – 12,000 school children holding coloured cards, each a pixel in a constantly changing image.

All the incredible feats of individual balance, contortion and grace glimpsed in the girls' daily practice culminate in awe inspiring mass movement.

Through sport Director/Producer Daniel Gordon has found the perfect way to peek behind the world's last iron curtain. His debut production The Game of Their Lives told the story of North Korea's 1966 World Cup soccer team who produced one of the biggest upsets in football history when they knocked Italy out of the tournament.

This gained him the opportunity to filming the Mass Games and delve deeper into North Korean life.

A State of Mind is at once study in human conditioning, splendid gymnastic discipline and the fundamental principals of a society closed to the wider world. It exposes the sinister and the beautiful of everyday life in a country little known to the world.

–Marcus Stickley

The World Cinema Showcase begins in Wellington at the Paramount from March 17-30, then Christchurch at Rialto Cinemas from March 31 to April 13, followed by Dunedin at the Regent Theatre from April 7-20, and finally in Auckland at the Academy from April 14 to May 4. Hardcopy programmes, tickets and bookings are available at festival venues.


Following Marcus' cue, MUBARAK ALI indulged in the anime classic Whisper of the Heart, part of a Studio Ghibli retrospective; TIM WONG ducked for cover upon viewing Breaking News and The Brotherhood of War, two very different bullet ballets from Hong Kong and Korea; while KIM LESCH wallowed in the sounds of Red, White & Blues, one third of The Blues Collection on show.


Whisper of the Heart (2004)
Yoshifumi Kondo | Japan | 93 min | Featuring: Pak Hyon-Sun, Kim Song-Yon.

A WHOLE quarter of the Studio Ghibli retrospective at this year's World Cinema Showcase is the Miyazaki-penned and Yoshifumi Kondo-directed, Whisper of the Heart, perhaps the wisest of all the Ghibli films (especially when considered together with Takahata's Only Yesterday, also brilliant and showing at the WCS). The simplicity and realism of Whisper gradually becomes the film's gentle momentum as Shizuku, the wise-beyond-her-years teenage girl who is the object of the film, is propelled towards the early stages of her evolution into adulthood, amidst all the confusions and obsessions of puberty, by falling in love (yes, it's not just a crush) with someone who has to leave for Italy to chase his dream of becoming a violin-maker. Unlike most Ghibli films, there is only one excursion into (Castle in the Sky-esque) fantasy which breaks the film's leisurely pace – fantasy which involves the strangely-beguiling statue of a cat called 'The Baron' (who is given life of his own in Whisper's underwhelming spin-off, The Cat Returns), whom Shizuku discovers in a nearly-forgotten antique shop run by an old man who holds his own stories – yet the film somehow manages to remain magical throughout (admittedly, this may have something to do with the film's constantly-resurfacing Japanese cover of John Denver's 'Country Road'). Eventually, the film isn't really as much about Love-as-that-great-mysterious-force as it is about how such mysterious forces of nature cause someone to drift towards self-evaluation and the discovery of conscious Change.

If Kondo's Whisper of the Heat celebrates its heroine's magical initiation into personal growth, then Takahata's Only Yesterday is a brief introspective account of an adult woman who is ostensibly at the end of all human experience. Don't write off its pastoral sombreness and familial nostalgia as Ozu-homage just yet though, as the film has more to offer in the form of delicate characterisations, and multiple flashbacks composed of constant movement that are heartbreakingly juxtaposed with the static 'now'. The film ultimately isn't as relentless as Takahata's earlier Grave of the Fireflies, but you're unlikely to ever see a more spartan animated film.

Also showing at the WCS are two of Takahata's lighter works, of which I've only seen the breezy satire Pom Poko/The Raccoon War, and look forward to My Neighbours, The Yamadas, which is generally considered his best comedy.

–Mubarak Ali

Only Yesterday, My Neighbors the Yamadas, Pom Poko and Whisper of the Heart screen as part of WCS programmes in Wellington and Auckland only. In their place, last year's NZIFF Hayao Miyazaki retrospective including My Neighbor Totoro, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Porco Rosso, screen in Christchurch and Dunedin instead.


Breaking News (2004)
Johnnie To | Hong Kong | 90 min | Featuring: Kelly Chen, Richie Ren, Nick Cheung.

A BLUE-TINTED smattering of media critique, urban terrorism and Kelly Chen's brow line, Breaking News is like a lot of Asian Cinema these days: risky as hell yet oh-so-marketable, it too sheds further light on why Hollywood so often turns to the East for its talent and ideas. For Johnnie To – a prolific master of genre, if not Hong Kong's last standing auteur – this is almost business as usual. Almost, because you don't see many seven-minute long, single-take opening shots everyday. Channelling the ghost of Touch of Evil, To kick-starts proceedings with this staggering, ridiculously complex set piece of a heist gone astray. In the fallout, cops die, bad guys escape, and the news media leap all over the embarrassment like a perpetual dog in heat. In response, the good guys call on the savvy Inspector Fong (Kelly Chen): she'll "outfox" 'em with her Reality TV prowess and shrewd editing skills, although the result seems to resemble something more out of The Apprentice than CNN. Case in point: in one episode, Donald Trump's lemmings are asked to create an ad campaign for New York City Police recruitment. The winning team pitch law enforcement as honourable and trustworthy. The losing team end up turning New York into a police state. Fong's need to counter public broadcasts of an increasingly elusive terror threat sees her take up the latter option – and it works, for a bit, until the inevitable prospect of a face-to-face smack down with ringleader Yuan (Richie Ren), rendering the whole control room theory redundant by the film's end. To's media comment is pertinent yet equally disposable; he's never been one to get in the way of movies being movies, and Breaking News is certainly no Network. Indeed at a slick 90 minutes, it's impressively viewed as a tightly wound, precisely directed slab of action cinema – rather like Hard-Boiled in parts, and runnier elsewhere.

–Tim Wong

See also: Throw Down


The Brotherhood of War/Taegukgi (2004)
Kang Je-gyu | Korea | 140 min | Featuring: Jang Dong-gun, Won Bin, Lee Eun-joo.

THE IMAGE of a bloody leg stump or a man cradling his own disembowelled intestines makes for either a great Zombie flesh-eating movie, or a no-holds-barred war epic. The latter, in this instance, is the route of choice for The Brotherhood of War – a sonic boom of camera seizures and perpetual dirt showers that's all Saving Private Ryan in its camo-slaughterhouse aesthetic, much like every other war film that's followed in Steven Spielberg's wake. The difference here is that those Americans – the war-infatuated freedom fighters that they are – find themselves overlooked for a change amidst the barrage of mortar rounds and cries of medic that is the Korean War. Kang Ju-gyu's film is a genre rarity in this sense: sprawling if not traumatic as expected, but relayed from an unusually non-US perspective, with the entire physical and emotional spectrum of war funnelled through the handholding, ice-cream licking intimacy of brothers Jin-Tae and Jin-Seok. Drafted unwillingly, their dynamic is made of overbearing, sacrificial stuff; only when Jin-Seok (Won Bin) breaks out of his dream-cocooned-hysteria and begins to fight, does it build to something darker, almost Red River-ish. Jin-Tae (Jang Dong-gun) is the older, tougher of the two and initially his glorified, shrapnel-dodging brand of Commando heroism threatens to defeat the entire North Korean army alone. Quickly though, it turns sour by way of war's tendency to corrupt even the most morally sound individual, the whole Dunson-Garth analogy coming to a heed when both brothers literally go their separate ways. Of course the film – a box-office breaker in its homeland – can't be all downward spiralling, and it's at moments like these when Kang really cranks the melodrama past eleven, and the patriotism beyond boiling point. That said, consider this less a flag-waving exercise, and more a reclamation of a "forgotten" past – one which Koreans have taken collective, cathartic ownership of by way of the ticket stub.

–Tim Wong


Red, White & Blues (2003)
Mike Figgis | USA | 93 min | Featuring: Tom Jones, Jeff Beck, Van Morrison, Humphrey Lyttelton, Lonnie Donnegan, B.B King, Albert Lee, Chris Farlowe, Gerogie Fame.

FOR ANYONE who genuinely cares about his or her music, to the point of extensive collecting, fact assembling, anecdotal toting obsessionals, then it's a treat to watch Red, White & Blues. Whether you follow Liz Phair, Johnny Cash, The Beatles, or Bela Fleck – when one appreciates music to a certain level, one will automatically appreciate a solid documentary on any type of music. Figgis skillfully intertwines clips of blues legends playing the classics with interviews that illustrate the knowledge and unabashed adoration of the blues from the chosen subjects. While I knew who Muddy Waters was, and can claim to have a Lucille guitar that resides in the home I grew up in, I was pleased by the easy way the film gently alerted the viewer to important blues legends that I had never heard of. I didn't find the film's specialised subject matter to deter any interest I had in it, rather, it allows the viewer to enjoy the music, taking long clips of various musicians playing their favorite blues songs. We can only let it wash over us, in total awe of the jaw dropping talents of the players.

The doco does the unexpected as it provides in depth research and knowledge for the impact of the blues on the U.K.'s musicians of the 50s and the 60s. We do not get a sniff of what America itself was doing with their plethora of talented African American musicians (refusing them entry to clubs); instead we get white Brits expounding on their personal experiences with the best musicians to get exported across the pond. Informative, intelligent, and full of Tom Jones (!) the doco proves it's mettle, and far more than the price of a ticket. Unplug the earphones and get down to the World Cinema Showcase to check this one out.

–Kim Lesch

Red, White & Blues features as part of a six-piece "Blues Collection" of documentaries, presented by Martin Scorsese. Of the six films, three appear as part of this year's World Cinema Showcase. In addition to Mike Figgis' entry, The Soul of a Man by Wim Wenders, and Feel Life Going Home by Scorsese himself, also screen.

14.03.05 | Print-friendly Version | © Marcus Stickley, Mubarak Ali, Tim Wong, Kim Lesch / Lumière 2005 | www.lumiere.net.nz