The Juche Idea

Continuing his long-standing fascination with propaganda, experimental provocateur Jim Finn (Interkosmos) offers a methodical, oft-hilarious parable about a South Korean video artist (Jung) enrolled in a North Korean artists’ residency. She’s attempting to master the communist nation’s cultish Juche ideals of self-sufficiency; her repressive studies are fleshed out by North Korean melodramas (which Finn dissects via split-screen analyses) and fictional instructional videos that mock Western culture. In the director’s hands, these societal passion plays and “documentaries” offer a terrifying, top-down perversion of art itself—another insidious extension of politics by other means.—S. James Snyder

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