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Event
URBAN GIRL COMES TO GET MARRIED
Dir. by Kim Il-Sung University students, 1993
North Korea, 73 min.
In Korean with English subtitles
In URBAN GIRL COMES TO GET MARRIED, Ri Hyang, the best fabric cutter at an urban clothing factory, joins her all-female coworkers on a trip to the countryside as part of a Peasant-Worker Alliance program, where they must work as demanded by Juche farming method. Amid montages of joyous rice planting and flowing grain, Ri Hyang encounters the visionary young man behind the collective farms duck breeding project, Song Sik. She turns up her nose at first, but his commitment to the fatherly leaders agricultural innovation protocol and rock n roll drumming skills begin to win her over. When he tells her, Its time to feed duck dung to the gas furnace, she says, I can help you. Together, they realize that this duck dung is just the beginning, for it will contribute to agricultural development, including mechanization and chemicalization.
Featuring a musical interlude where the principal characters perform the films titular theme song for assembled workers and peasants, URBAN GIRL COMES TO GET MARRIED claims that a modern farm village is good to live in, encouraging the best and brightest young urban women to marry men in the countryside so they can apply their worldly intelligence to the execution of socialist rural theses.
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As a gesture of goodwill towards our new Axis of Evil partners, Spectacle will be screening a handful of works from North Koreas towering cinema canon.
North Koreas late Kim Jong-Il was, by all accounts, a legendary cinephile who aimed to surpass the technical and artistic standards of Moscow. The films produced under his leadership engage directly with the concept of juche, a particularly North Korean form of Marxism-Leninism generally revolving around the idea of total, homegrown self-reliance; in the senior Kim Il Sungs words: having the attitude of master toward revolution and construction in ones own countryusing your own brains, believing your own strength and displaying the revolutionary spirit of self-reliance, and thus solving your own problems for yourself on your own responsibility under all circumstances.
Initially working as department director of propaganda and agitation, the young Kim Jong Il instituted wide-sweeping reforms in the North Korean film industry, mandating that artists avoid both art-for-arts sake on one extreme and stiff, dogmatic films that neglect form and artistry on the other. He then actively encouraged people to emulate the heroes from films: Day after day, leading characters in the works of art become real in each factory and each workshop, he wrote.
Being at once proudly insular and aspiring to the artistic achievements of great Russian filmmakers and the magic of Hollywood, North Korean film is singularly baffling, enrapturing, inspiring and unsettling.
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LocationSPECTACLE THEATER (View)
124 South 3rd Street
Brooklyn, NY 11249
United States
Categories
| Kid Friendly: No |
| Dog Friendly: No |
| Non-Smoking: Yes! |
| Wheelchair Accessible: No |
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