Over the course of one year, the film follows the life of an ordinary Pyongyang family whose daughter was chosen to take part in one of the famous Korean “Spartakiads”. The ritualised explosions of colour and joy contrast sharply with pale everyday reality, which is not particularly terrible, but rather quite surreal, like a typical life seen “through the looking glass”. The film portrays North Korea in probably the only possible way: as an unintentional situational tragicomedy. Precisely staged film scenes duplicate principles common for life in “the most beautiful country on the eastern side of the globe”: virtually horrifying selfstaging of the residents’ own lives. “Zin-mi, you have joined Children’s Union, what do you expect from your adult life?” “When joining the Children‘s Union, we enter the adult life. And begin to think, what else shall you do for the Great Leader Kim Jong Un.”