A Bad Review for ‘A State of Mind’

[Update: Yonhap reports that this year’s Arirang Festival has been cancelled. Scroll down for details.]

I haven’t seen the film, nor have I seen the promos for it, but this sounds like a fair criticism to me:

You know you’re looking at propaganda when you see a cute little white dog prancing through the apartment of the physicist father of 11-year-old Kim Song-yon – as if dogs come with the nice kitchen and furniture for middle-class North Koreans.

Or, judging from the straight-faced observation that “North Korea is divided into three classes – workers, peasants and intellectuals”, and all are treated equally, are we to believe that all North Koreans have cute little doggies, even those so driven by starvation that in truth they would die for a nice slab of dog meat?

Don Kirk, writing in the Asia Times, notes that the Discovery Channel gave it tons of publicity and a prime-time slot. I wonder why “Seoul Train” and “Abduction” (trailer / review / review) can’t get this kind of air play. I’ve really never considered useful idiots like the “Korean Friendship Association” losers to be any cause for undue alarm, but the producers of this film may leave plenty of viewers with a very distorted view about North Korea, just as plenty of views were once distorted by “Olympia” and “Triumph of the Will.”

Update:

“Pyongyang’s delegation to the United Nations informed us that Arirang festival will be resumed next spring,” Yoon Gil-sang, the leader of a pro-North Korean organization in the United States, the Korean American National Coordinating Council, told the Minjok Tongshin.

We have our own Chosen Soren right here? I think Jake Blues speaks for me on that one.

The festival was originally scheduled to run from Aug. 15 to mid-October. The North proposed last month that about 500 to 600 South Korean tourists travel to Pyongyang every day to see the festival.

Seoul agreed to allow South Korean juche fans to attend and spend their won on this propaganda festival just after North Korea launched its missiles and brought down the condemnation of the rest of the world.

But South Korean government officials said they have not received any notice from Pyongyang about the cancellation of the festival. But they feared that if the report is accurate, inter-Korean exchanges could be further reduced amid growing tension over the North’s recent missile tests.

Sadly, I have lost my capacity to be shocked by this sort of reaction from the South Korean government.

One wonders why the North Koreans really did this. The floods are in fact reported to have left thousands dead or homeless, aside from this:

The neighborhood of Pyongyang’s May Day Stadium, the venue of the Arirang mass gymnastics event, has also reportedly been severely destroyed by recent downpours.

Whatever “severely destroyed” means, and how easy the damage could be hidden, I won’t try to guess. Still, horrific things have been going on in North Korea for years, and they’ve never stopped the propaganda juggernaut’s biggest annual event. Another possible explanation is that their recent cash flow problems forced them to do this.

Another possibility: the North Koreans could see that they were taking a beating in the international press.
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