Review of Under the Sun (2015)
Seen in 2019.
A young girl in South Korea joins the Korean Children’s Union. Telling this story, Russian director Vitaliy Manskiy includes Korean apparatchiks who arrange reality in front of Manskiy’s running camera, casting the girl’s friends and parents in more heroic roles. The girl cries without knowing why.
A documentary about its own making. It’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) with every last bit of medial experimentation and joy sucked out of it, replaced with totalitarian pretense at the pace of Shoah (1985). The word “Orwellian” gets thrown around a lot, but this is it.