North Korea is one of the world’s most isolated nations. For sixty years, North Koreans have been governed by a totalitarian regime. A cult of personality surrounds its two recent leaders: first, Kim Il Sung, and now, his son, Kim Jong Il. For Kim Jong Il’s 46th birthday, a hybrid begonia named kimjongilia was created, symbolizing wisdom, love, justice, and peace. The film draws its name from this bright red flower and reveals the extraordinary stories told by survivors of North Korea’s vast prison camps, of deadly famine, and of every kind of repression. In a series of devastating interviews with refugees, director N.C. Helkin traces their torturous paths to freedom, on rickety sailboats and across mountain passes, while exposing the inhuman conditions they suffered in the nation’s concentration camps. Their experiences are interspersed with archival footage of North Korean propaganda films and original scenes that illuminate the contours of daily life for a people whose every action is monitored, and whose every thought could bring official retribution. Along with the survivors’ stories, Kimjongilia examines the mass illusion possible under totalitarianism and the human rights abuses required to maintain that illusion.

Grade Level: Grades 10-12, College and University
Subjects: Asian Studies, Culture
Copyright: © 2009 Lorber HT Digital. All rights reserved.
Set: DVD Only
Total Running Time: 74 minutes.
Catalog Number: LF-DV-54
Educational Prices:

Educational with Public Performance Rights: $249.00

Educational without Public Performance Rights: $129.00

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Indigenous only to gardens north of the thirty-eighth parallel, the “kimjongilia” is a flower named for the Dear Leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, he of the Don King hair and Linda Hunt height. Yet to the Anglophone ear the title of this mesmerizing documentary by writer-director H.C. Heinkin is more liable to conjure up a monster movie – the people-crushing Godzilla, perhaps, which is not far off the mark. Still shuttered behind barbed wire in a wired world, North Korea remains an undiscovered country dimly glimpsed in smuggled video and state-approved photo ops. In a brisk seventy-five minutes, Heinkin puts a human face to the figures behind the flash cards. A tale of great escapes from a countrywide gulag, Kimjongilia is built around the testimony of a handful of exceptionally gutsy and lucky men and women. Like Holocaust survivors, they tell their tales in flat, matter-of-fact tones, short on histrionics and tears. To underscore the material difference between the two Koreas, Heinkin’s camera lingers on the iconic satellite picture of the peninsula at night. Below the latitude line, the electrified south is lit up like Disneyland; above the line, the country is blanketed in pitch blackness. In Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s Team America: World Police (2004), the South Park conservatives string up Kim Jong Il as a mad marionette, wandering around his palatial digs in “rone-ly, so rone-ly” isolation. Too often, though, the monstrous reality of life in North Korea is masked by the off-the-charts strangeness of the regime and the quirky goofiness of its five-foot-three despot. Kimjongilia is a necessary corrective.