V luchakh solnca

After two years of negotiations with North Korean authorities, Vitaly Mansky received an invitation to document the life of an eight-year-old girl and her parents in the capital city of Pyongyang, only to learn upon arrival that every frame of his film would be scripted and controlled by state workers to create a piece of propaganda. “He realized that they wouldn’t let him go anywhere by himself, and that he couldn’t speak directly with any character,” says Simone Baumann, one of the film’s producers. “He had to change the concept.” It was at this point that Mansky decided he would keep the camera rolling between shots, capturing how the North Korean state workers would stage scenes and change dialogue to better fit their nationalist narrative. Though the state employees monitoring the production deleted his footage from the camera’s memory card after each day of shooting, they were unaware of a second memory card backing up everything that was shot. (Graham Winfrey)