RED CHAPEL
You will probably never find a movie, especially a documentary, where it is so much fun to describe the incredibly complicated premise.
This selection I saw at the Wisconsin Film Festival of 2011 is a very rare look into North Korea. In order to get permission to film this country as candidly as possible, the Danish filmmaker proposed a cultural exchange program. Two Danes of Korean descent offer to perform as a comedy duo for a select North Korean audience. The reasons why the North Koreans accept are a little hard to fathom, but it boils down to using these visitors for propaganda purposes. Through their record performance they can both show their openness to their Westernized Korean brothers and to show how ridiculous the non-Communist world is through the absurd and ridiculous antics of this comedy duo's performance.
BUT WAIT, there's more, and it adds an even more dark and weird turn to this film. One of the Korean-Danes actually is a spastic (his words that he uses for himself, which I hope isn't offensive). He has a speech impediment and uses a wheelchair. His presence serves two purposes for both the propogandists and the sneaky Dane filmmaker. He is used as a propaganda tool because of the suspicion by many human rights activists that North Korea has actually executed many disabled people over the years. This is a way for them to counter some of those suspicions. From a more immediate standpoint, the disabled Dane's speech impediment makes it very hard for the North Korean "handlers", already challenged by the Korean-to-Danish translation, to decide whether what is being filmed and what is being said will undermine the regime if the footage is allowed to leave the country. So you get a few incredible moments where this guy says how ridiculous everyone in North Korea is to their faces, and this footage actually makes it out of the country intact for our American eyes to see!
What a premise! And it's honestly a hard one to sustain, especially through interesting but unfocused sidetracks where the disabled Korean begins to feel sympathy for their North Korean tour guides and resists chances to humiliate them. Even the filmmaker himself questions whether he is abusing his authority and exploiting these two Danish-Koreans for less-than-noble purposes. All this introspection takes a little away from the satire the film tries to accomplish but it does offer another level to the documentary.
It's hard to believe there isn't any other way to get this kind of access to North Korean society, but despite the films flaws, whatever this filmmaker did to find this window into an incredibly disturbing world was worth it. The whole convoluted setup to get this kind of openness from an oppressive regime actually makes it a fitting portrayal of a crude and iconoclastic country so dedicated to using lies, delusion, and overinflated egos to ignore reality.
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