The Flower Girl () is a North Korean revolutionary genre theatrical performance, which was allegedly written by the country's leader Kim Il Sung according to official North Korean sources. The performance is considered one of the "Five Great Revolutionary Operas", a group of classical, revolution-themed opera repertoires well received within North Korea. It was also made into a novel. A film adaption of the opera starring Hong Yong Hee was made in 1972.
Plot
The story is set during the 1930s, and is based on the anti-Japanese guerrilla movement during the period of Japanese occupation in Korea. A poor, rural girl, around whom the plot is centred, picks flowers on the mountain every day to sell at the market, in order to care for her ill mother. Additionally, she has a blind sister, and her father is deceased. Her mother is in debt to the landlord, and is bankrupt and unable to purchase food. The landlord's subordinates frequently harass the girl and call for her to work for them, which her mother refuses. The girl then finds her blind sister attempting to earn money by singing on the street, to her anger.
Eventually, she collects enough money to purchase medicine for her ill mother, but by the time she returns, her mother has already died. The landlord's wife becomes very sick, and suspects that the flower girl's blind sister is possessed by the spirit of her deceased mother, and so arranges for her to be frozen to death in the snow. When the flower girl returns home and asks where her sister has gone, the landlord's subordinates chain her up. At this moment, her brother, who has joined the Revolutionary Army, returns home to visit family when he realises that the flower girl has been locked up, and so organises a group of villagers to overthrow the landlord.
Creation
The Flower Girl is based on a play written by Kim Il Sung in the 1930s while he was imprisoned by the Japanese, in Jilin. The first section of his 1992 memoir With the Century, entitled "Anti-Japanese Revolution", notes that:
There was a time during our country's independence movement where we held on to our vision to build an "ideal village" concept... At the time, we adopted the Korean students in Jilin to teach village people to sing a large variety of revolutionary songs, such as the Red Flag Song and Revolution Song. In Wujiazi we formed a performance group based at Samsong school led by Kye Yong-chun. It was during this time that I was completing the script for The Flower Girl, which I had started whilst I was in Jilin City. Upon finishing the script, production of the opera began, and we staged the opera in the Samsong school hall on the 13th anniversary of the October Revolution. For many years after liberation, the opera hadn't been performed since, until it was improved and adapted for film, and re-written as a novel, under the guidance of the Organising Secretary (Kim Jong-il) and released in the early 1970s.
Although it is commonly stated that Kim Il Sung was the sole author of the production, many critics in China cast doubts over the reliability of the claim, and suggest that other North Korean writers may have also had some form of interaction in the opera's production.
The first official premiere of the opera production was held on November 30, 1972, in Pyongyang, where it was hailed as a great success.
According to official North Korean reports, in April 1968, Kim Jong Il suggested that another revolutionary opera, Sea of Blood, be adapted into a movie. Since then, other works have also been adapted into movies "under his guidance", with The Flower Girl also being adapted. The opera was intended to promote the communist ideology, by incorporating themes such as the class struggle against the bourgeois; such themes were similarly maintained in the film.
In April 1972, the film adaptation was officially launched. The film was directed by Choe Ik-kyu and the script was written by Pak Hak; Paekdu-san Group was responsible for the production of the film, which was filmed in color.
Reception
According to Paul Fischer, the author of A Kim Jong-Il Production, "it is almost impossible to exaggerate" the importance of The Flower Girl to North Korea's cultural history. The film was immensely popular both domestically and abroad, particularly in China. It was the first North Korean film to win an international film award, at the 18th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in 1972, and remained the only one until the 1980s.