frimp13

Told in a sort of slow burn/slow reveal style that largely takes place over a few days in December 1986 (but occasionally jumps around a bit in time) during two unrelated police killings of young Algerian men (one was shot by a drunk officer, the other brutally beaten by a motorcycle riot-response unit).

The film does a very good job of depicting how police distort "officer-involved" violent incidents and ultimately try to cover them up. From early on, the fix is in as Internal Affairs scrambles to delay announcing one death so soon after another.

The film is quite well-acted and does a very good job of mixing archival footage of actual events & people with the portrayals of those events by the cast. The use of music is particularly well done, with to notable exceptions: the somewhat jarring montages set to punk rock that seem to celebrate & revel in the violence of the protests, making the film seem a little less "balanced" than one might hope. (Whatever one thinks of protests or police brutality, surely throwing Molotov cocktails onto balconies of buildings in residential areas is not worthy of jubilation.)

The ultimate outcome of the investigations is explained in text via epilogue, but should come as no surprise to anyone who follows police brutality cases.

At its best, People Are The Sky is a touching personal story about the director's experience fleeing North Korea as a child during the Korean war and returning many years later to find a very different place, plus a revisionist history of how U.S. military & political actions created two Koreas, one of which hates the U.S. to this day, at least part due to bombings of civilians during the Korean War.

Unfortunately, only half the film is spent on those subjects. The other half, unfortunately is mired with an unfortunate & deeply misguided apologia of the North Korean regime, including a naive acceptance of the Potemkin Village production that North Korean officials put on for the director's benefit and the attempted pitch of a (false) moral equivalence between the totalitarian dictatorship of North Korea that controls every aspect of people's lives and the various faults of the US criminal justice system.

The film starts a bit slow, going over both the director's personal history and the modern history of North & South Korea. It takes quite a while for the director to even get to North Korea, which is the main selling point of this film. Once the director enters North Korea, it seems as though she is not going to take things lying down from the North Korean guides, sparring with them rather feistily, and being repeatedly instructed to stop asking certain questions.

But after awhile, the director seems to relent to the demands of the guides and the remainder of the film becomes what the North Korean regime wants you to see, featuring interview after interview with people conspicuously wearing pins with pictures of the Great Leader or the North Korean flag. She visits a Potemkin (and gov't run) Christian church in Pyongyang, interviews a gov't bureaucrat who denies that anything is amiss and talks about how the People's palace is built above the government buildings in Pyongyang because the government must look up to the people, tours the locations of several alleged "massacres" of North Koreans committed by Americans (and uncritically quotes the regime tour guides at each location without providing any context or rebuttal), meets the widow of a party politico who has fond memories of how they met, and visits a happy upper middle class couple who chat happily about having 24-hour free day care, and how the wife works a job and the husband sometimes cooks dinner. "Equality!" beams the director, ignoring the horrors visited upon so many other couples by the regime.

There is even a short section of direct apologia for North Korean human rights abuses where the director concludes that racial justice issues in America really make North Korea no worse than the US.

After the screening of the film, the director was asked about why she didn't show more of the negative parts of North Korea. She explained that the gov't-supplied "guides" (in reality, censor-chaperone regime information officers) controlled where she could go. But then, rather than talking about how this was a problem, she said she didn't understand why so many people thought it was such a problem to have a guide help show you around an unfamiliar country. That pretty much says all that needs to be said about the credulity with which she approached this project.

This is a charming, somewhat picaresque comedy about a naive, but partially college-educated Tunisian hayseed (complete with the ridiculous straw hat) named Aziz (quickly nicknamed "Zizou") who comes to Tunis just before the Arab Spring and becomes much wiser to the ways of the world as events unfold in his own life and in Tunisian politics.

At first, Zizou is repeatedly hustled & used by various business, political & religious factions in Tunis, but he eventually falls in with an interesting crowd of characters in the souk (the open-air market) and begins working as a TV/satellite technician, a position that takes him into the homes of many in Tunis, some of them quite powerful.

A large cast of interesting & believable male & female characters plus some beautiful seaside scenery make this a believable world that the audience wants to live in and explore. That's important because the plot is underdeveloped and the protagonist is generally quite passive.

With the exception of a key subplot involving his attempts to rescue a beautiful woman imprisoned by the regime, the main character is largely afloat in the city, buffeted by the seas of the social change around him, as well as the machinations of others. But like Forrest Gump, Zelig, and Chauncy Gardner, he often ends up in the right place at the right time and often says or does something critical to the events that take place.

Although not groundbreaking, this is a likable film that offers an off- beat, rather light-hearted (but thoughtful & nuanced) take on the Arab Spring in Tunisia.