User Reviews

People are the Sky, by Korea-born American filmmaker Da- Sil Kim-Gibson, is a film about her journey back to her childhood hometown in North Korea. Goes into the history of North and South Korea, the Korean War, and the devastation of North Korea by the US-led military in 1950s. Of course the filming in North Korea was highly restricted and she was chaperoned wherever she went, so but still she manages to capture the humanity of North Korean people and the connections she made with them during her journey. Great interviews with Korea experts, including Columbia Professor Charles Armstrong, and Chicago U Prof Bruce Cumings. After the film screening, we had a Skype interview with the filmmaker (she is based in NYC) and she told us that she sold a property she and her husband owned to make this film. She is now 75 years old. Talk about dedication!

At its best, People Are The Sky is a touching personal story about the director's experience fleeing North Korea as a child during the Korean war and returning many years later to find a very different place, plus a revisionist history of how U.S. military & political actions created two Koreas, one of which hates the U.S. to this day, at least part due to bombings of civilians during the Korean War.

Unfortunately, only half the film is spent on those subjects. The other half, unfortunately is mired with an unfortunate & deeply misguided apologia of the North Korean regime, including a naive acceptance of the Potemkin Village production that North Korean officials put on for the director's benefit and the attempted pitch of a (false) moral equivalence between the totalitarian dictatorship of North Korea that controls every aspect of people's lives and the various faults of the US criminal justice system.

The film starts a bit slow, going over both the director's personal history and the modern history of North & South Korea. It takes quite a while for the director to even get to North Korea, which is the main selling point of this film. Once the director enters North Korea, it seems as though she is not going to take things lying down from the North Korean guides, sparring with them rather feistily, and being repeatedly instructed to stop asking certain questions.

But after awhile, the director seems to relent to the demands of the guides and the remainder of the film becomes what the North Korean regime wants you to see, featuring interview after interview with people conspicuously wearing pins with pictures of the Great Leader or the North Korean flag. She visits a Potemkin (and gov't run) Christian church in Pyongyang, interviews a gov't bureaucrat who denies that anything is amiss and talks about how the People's palace is built above the government buildings in Pyongyang because the government must look up to the people, tours the locations of several alleged "massacres" of North Koreans committed by Americans (and uncritically quotes the regime tour guides at each location without providing any context or rebuttal), meets the widow of a party politico who has fond memories of how they met, and visits a happy upper middle class couple who chat happily about having 24-hour free day care, and how the wife works a job and the husband sometimes cooks dinner. "Equality!" beams the director, ignoring the horrors visited upon so many other couples by the regime.

There is even a short section of direct apologia for North Korean human rights abuses where the director concludes that racial justice issues in America really make North Korea no worse than the US.

After the screening of the film, the director was asked about why she didn't show more of the negative parts of North Korea. She explained that the gov't-supplied "guides" (in reality, censor-chaperone regime information officers) controlled where she could go. But then, rather than talking about how this was a problem, she said she didn't understand why so many people thought it was such a problem to have a guide help show you around an unfamiliar country. That pretty much says all that needs to be said about the credulity with which she approached this project.

There are several interviews within this film that are unusual compared to other North Korean content. I have never seen a piece of media on this topic with so much natural conversation of a political/historical nature! With the constant propaganda in the western world media like this is more and more relevant and that is why I have given a 10/10 score.

The film by no means is trying to paint North Korea as "good" but does at several points give context on why the country is the way it is. I really felt at the end of it that North Korea was like any other place, full of pros and cons, good and bad.