Experiencing North Korean “method acting” in the most visceral way.
An ingenious method of penetrating the most isolated country in the world allows an Australian filmmaker access to what proves to be a surprisingly sympathetic North Korean soul.
In 2012, Sydney-based Broinowski was invited to make a short film with Kim Jong II’s top filmmakers by wildly convoluted means. She came upon a book that the North Korean dictator (who died in 2011) had written about cinema and directing and learned how this son of Kim Il Sung had revolutionized the country’s film industry by shifting the propaganda focus “from dry, Soviet-style epics extolling the virtues of communism to full-blown celebrations of the heavenly supremacy” of his father. Kim managed to do this by kidnapping the famous South Korean filmmaker Shin Sang-ok and his movie star wife, Choi Eun-hee, in the late 1970s and turning out such classics as Pulgasari. The author was faced with a David-and-Goliath theme, much extolled by Kim, in her own backyard, as it were, in trying to save the neighborhood Sydney Park from coal seam gas drilling by the dark-sounding company Dart Energy. By harnessing the filmmaking ideas of Kim to the “ideologically pure” theme of saving the children’s playground from the capitalists, she hit on a perfect way of winning over the North Koreans. Her way of entree, however, takes up half the book, including time and numerous handlers and lots of cash, while the severely censored tours in Pyongyang are fairly well-documented elsewhere. What is startling in this book is Broinowski’s exploration inside the massively powerful propaganda factory of the Pyongyang Film Studio, where the author met the famous, now aging actors, composers, and cineastes of Kim’s reign—e.g., the exacting director Mr. Pak (the “North Korean Scorsese—known for searing political thrillers”), who became her mentor.
Experiencing North Korean “method acting” in the most visceral way.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62872-676-3
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: Sept. 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
