“There are moments of near hilarity, as when Mr. Kim tours a collective farm populated with ostriches. Ostriches in North Korea? And yet there they are. There is literary content: static shots of the day’s newspapers, page by page. And children’s programming appears in the form of a cartoon in which a boy hero is captured by the Japanese, beaten severely and bound with a stick jammed in his mouth to prevent him from screaming for help.”
