a review of 变节

#75 (March 16/31) The third documentary in the Mubi NK film series, focuses on the story of Joe Dresnok, an American soldier who went AWOL and defected to North Korea in the early '60s and still lives there to this day, woven with the stories of a few other American defectors. The film takes the approach that Dresnok is unquestionably compromised by his experiences and therefore a partially unreliable narrator of his own story, but the overall details of his personal biography and his life in Pyongyang are presented with a surprising amount of candor. The thing that struck me about his narrative of growing up as an orphan in the 1940s and 50s South is how much it stands as a counterexample of the myth of the American Dream, and fully reveals the temptation of authoritarianism for somebody raised in these desperate circumstances.