Ordinary People at the End of the World
The question Have Fun in Pyongyang asks—implicitly, from the title forward—is the one that’s hardest to sit with: are people there allowed to have fun? And if they are, does that complicate our picture of the place, or does it make it worse?
Filmmakers Pierre-Olivier François and Patrick Maurus spent eight years making forty separate trips to North Korea, which is an almost absurd level of commitment to a subject that most documentarians approach once, carefully, and leave shaken. What they accumulated is something rarer than a political exposé: footage of harvest rituals, factory floors, folk festivals, singing competitions—the texture of everyday life in one of the most isolated countries on the planet, inhabited by twenty-five million people who didn’t choose their regime any more than anyone else chooses where they’re born.
It’s difficult to watch without the political context bleeding in. You know about the Kim dynasty—the third generation of it now, Kim Jong-un, with his nuclear tests and his military parades and his vanishings of people who displease him. You know about the famine of the 1990s that killed hundreds of thousands. You know about the defectors’ accounts, the labor camps, the way information is controlled so thoroughly that most North Koreans have genuinely never encountered a contrary version of their own history. Carrying all of that into footage of people at a harvest festival creates a strange doubling: you’re watching people live, and you’re watching a system sustain itself through the appearance of normalcy.
What the film resists—and this is where it becomes valuable—is the flattening of those twenty-five million people into props for a political argument. The villagers at the harvest ritual aren’t performing suffering for the camera, nor are they performing contentment. They’re doing the thing. The singing competitions feel real in the way singing competitions everywhere feel real: competitive, slightly absurd, deeply human. François and Maurus don’t editorialize. They let the images accumulate and ask you to do your own thinking.
I find myself returning to the question the film leaves open: how does a society absorb that much concentrated trauma—the famine, the isolation, decades of it—and still look, at ground level, like a society? The answer is probably something grim about human adaptability. We are extraordinarily good at making peace with things we can’t change. That’s not a North Korean trait. That’s just what people do.