Film provides rare glimpse of life in North Korea

PARIS -- The plot is predictable, the acting maudlin and the ideology is spread on thick, but "The Schoolgirl's Diary" has something most B-movies don't: The first North Korean film ever distributed commercially in the West, it provides a rare, if sugarcoated, glimpse of daily life in one of the world's most secretive and repressive nations.

"The Schoolgirl's Diary" -- "Han Nyeohaksaengeui Ilgi," in Korean -- is the story of a rebellious high schooler who questions her parents' values. Soo Ryun rails against her absentee father, a scientist who puts the good of the nation before that of his family, and her hardworking, submissive mother.

Screenwriters reportedly got help drafting the script from North Korea's reclusive and autocratic leader Kim Jong Il.

It's not giving too much away to say that the misguided heroine, played by 18-year-old Pak Mi Hyang, is brought back into the fold just in time for a tearful conclusion.

Still, what it lacks in surprises, the film makes up for in sheer novelty value.

North Korea's state-controlled film industry makes a handful of movies a year, most of them barely watchable vehicles for official propaganda.

Only a few of them have ever been seen outside the country. Last month's French premiere of "The Schoolgirl's Diary" marked the first time a North Korean movie had ever hit movie theaters outside those in a few friendly communist countries, such as China and Cuba, said Antoine Coppola, the author of several books on Korean cinema.

"North Korea feels it's misunderstood," Coppola said. "This is the regime's way of communicating with the world."

The country still draws fire from human rights advocates who denounce its use of the death penalty, even for political crimes, its detention of tens of thousands of political prisoners, the torture of people who try to flee abroad and severe restrictions of freedom of expression and religion.

"There are systemic violations of rights to life," Rajiv Narayan, an Amnesty International researcher on North Korea, said. Narayan cited public executions, food shortages and rationing, prison camps and other abuses.

The movie glosses over those and other harsh realities of life in North Korea: There is no reference to the famine that is thought to have killed some 2 million people since the 1990s. The characters are plump and healthy, wear colorful clothes and hang out in high-tech settings filled with rows of computers and purring machines with flashing lights.

With its wobbly, hand-held camera, the movie often has a gritty, documentary feel. Except for when the characters interrupt a scene to burst into song, zealously belting out their undying love for the "dear general," referring to Kim Jong Il, to an accompanying accordion.

James Velaise, who heads the movie's French distributor, Pretty Pictures, said there are no immediate plans for a U.S. release.