News Features

Photos: North Korea's surreal Mass Games

While everyone else watches the Olympics, Asia's weirdest sporting event transpires in the world's most secretive country

By MICHAEL GAO | September 8, 2008

080808_NK3
Photo by Michael Gao

In 2003 a British film crew followed two North Korean schoolgirls — Pak Hyon Sun, aged 13, and Kim Song Yon, 11 — for nine months as they trained for the Mass Games. The resulting documentary, A State Of Mind, reveals Pak training in a Pyongyang car park for up to 10 hours a day in temperatures as low as minus 20C. "Sometimes when I train I fall over and hurt my knees," she told the filmmakers, "but I long for the day I perform for the General, so I train through the pain."

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Review: Kimjongilia
There is very little new in N.C. Heikin's documentary attack on North Korea's endless dictatorship that hasn't been seen or heard before.
The death of the American city, revisited
Urban renewal is seldom discussed as anything but the great scourge of the American city — a disastrous post-World War II push to steamroll working-class neighborhoods and replace them with towering concrete buildings and cavernous plazas that sterilized once-vibrant places.
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