Notizie

In 2006, Danish journalist and filmmaker Mads Brügger journeyed to North Korea with two performers, Simon Jul and Jacob Nossell, to reveal the corruption of the country's censorship up close. The ruse was an elaborate combination of documentary exposé, performance art and advocacy: Jul, a noted Danish actor, and Nossell, a "spastic" stand-up comic whose speech impairments make his words difficult to decipher in any language, would perform a play ...

by Steve Dollar

Winner of the World Cinema Jury Prize for documentary at this year's Sundance Film Festival, The Red Chapel is yet another one of those documentary whatzits that made moviegoing such a glorious mindfuck in 2010. Only in this case, Danish filmmaker Mads Brügger doesn't trick the audience. He wheels the Trojan Horse of "cultural exchange" into Kim Jong-il's own private Neverland. Posing as the director of a half-Danish, half-Korean comedy duo called The Red Chapel, he somehow convinces the North Korean government to let the comedians perform before an audience in Pyongyang.

The real funny business is that the performers—the burly Simon Jul Jørgensen and the spindly, 18-year-old Jacob Nossell—are amateurs cast to portray the roles, picked because their Korean heritage made a good pitch to Dear Leader's propaganda-minded minions. As a twist, Jacob is a self-described "spastic," whose speech and movement, while impaired, are much...

This review originally ran as part of our coverage of the 2010 SXSW Film Festival.

A confession: I passed over "The Red Chapel" a few times on the festival circuit before I finally sat down to see it. I'd glance over the description -- "small theater troupe," "Denmark," "cultural exchange visit," "North Korea" -- and I'd imagine... actually, I don't know what I'd imagine, but it wasn't promising.

Well, mea culpa. This Danish documentary is incredibly uncomfortably funny, like a love child of "The Idiots" (it's the product of Lars von Trier's Zentropa Productions) and "Borat" that managed to grow a complicated political conscience. And it is, indeed, about a small theater troupe from Denmark who go to North Korea on a cultural exchange visit. Sort of.

Director Mads Brügger, who also narrates and appears on camera, wanted to make a film about the Dprk's terrible conditions -- to, in his words,...