Translated material
"Everything is there - fake"
Documentary Vitaly Mansky spoke about work in the DPRK: The New Times
The Russian documentary Vitaly Mansky made a film about the DPRK-the project was submitted as the first joint Russian-North Korean documentary. The picture is called "in the rays of the sun." It was necessary to shoot it according to a pre -written scenario, as Mansky said - completely false. About how the film crew tried to include something real in the picture, and that he learned about North Korea for 45 days of working in Pyongyang, Vitaly Mansky told the chief editor of The New Times Evgenia Albats.
Work on the film "In the Rays of the Sun" began in February 2015. According to the initial agreement, the Vitaly Mansky team was supposed to take 75 days in Pyongyang during three business trips, but managed to work out only 45 days: the third time the crew was no longer allowed into the country.
The script was written back in 2013 - the film was supposed to talk about a girl who was taken in the North Korean pioneer organization, after which she takes part in creating a lively picture of a happy life. The roles of the girl and her parents were spelled out in the script before the director was able to choose the heroine.
Mansky says that he opted for eight -year -old Zin Mi, because her dad worked as a journalist, and her mother in the factory dining room.
“When we arrived to shoot, dad miraculously turned into an engineer into an exemplary sewing factory, mom-into an employee of an exemplary factory for the manufacture of soy milk,” the director said. According to him, during the filming of a one -room apartment, the family was moved to a chic house in the center of Pyongyan - and it was clear around the house that no one had ever lived in it.
According to the observations of Vitaly Mansky, the whole life in Pyongyang turned out to be false - for example, shops play the role of exhibition halls, where nothing can be bought, there are houses without doors in which light is lit in the evenings. “Everything is fake there,” the director recalls. At the same time, according to him, it is not clear why this is being done: after all, foreigners in the DPRK, if they fall, are under constant accompaniment.
In particular, Mansky talks about filming in the Pyongyansky metro: a foreigner can drive in it only two stops of a special route - enter a certain station and go out at a certain station.
“We did not have time to finish the shooting and ask you to give us a few more stations. In response, they offer to go back and tumble there. I explain: other people will already be on the way back in the wagons. The accompanying people answer: this is not a problem. And they command people in the carriage: “They got up and crossed the station.” And the whole car gets up, goes and sits down in the car, which goes in the opposite direction. Silently, without discussion. ”
In the course of work in Pyongyang, the film crew tried several times to break out from under the custody of the accompanying and secretly shoot something that was not in the approved scenario. Part of the material, according to Vitaly Mansky, was shot "because of the curtain in the hotel." The captured material had to be taken every day to the inspectors, and the operator had to secretly copy the records on the memory card, which was taken out of North Korea.
In November 2015, the film “In the Rays of the Sun” received a prize for the best directing at the Dark Nights International Film Festival in Tallinn. The Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, which initially supported the project, asked to remove itself from the credits after the protest of representatives of the DPRK.
“When we filmed the scene of children in the pioneers, accompanying us at the children-about seven-eights, in military uniforms, and they say:“ Their parents died in the war, these are children of the war. ” What is the war? The last war in which North Korea participated was sixty years ago! But they are completely sure: somewhere there is a war. ”