KJCKorea
Journal Central

This study reads farmers' living conditions and survival strategies in North Korea through the discourse of work-team (bunjo) responsibility as constructed in the film The Master of the Bunjo (2011). The study examines how the film adapts the original short story The Wife's Character (2006), identifying what is borrowed, transformed, weakened, or newly added in the process, and compares these with cooperative farm realities documented in agricultural policy studies and defector testimonies. Methodologically, it employs symptomatic reading, cross-referencing the original story, the film, and prior scholarship, to identify traces of lived conditions that the film absorbs into official discourse or displaces to the narrative background. The analysis first examines how the film reconstructs the original story's everyday lifeworld around the discourse of ownership consciousness. Mountain Echoes (Sanullim, 1961) functions as an intertextual code framing the central conflict. The replacement of the unnamed wife with Soyŏng naturalizes reproductive labor by pushing domestic and childcare tensions out of the narrative. The substitution of the paddy-weeding episode with the compost incident reframes goodwill and accident as performance representation and public competition. The transformation of Suil into Munil shifts everyday social propriety toward evaluation and technological mediation, while the cableway project is reorganized from independent preemptive action into institutionally approved collective mobilization. The study then identifies where survival strategies surface symptomatically. Soyŏng's shame and nighttime supplementary labor expose the gap between represented and actual performance. Her status as a recipient of the Supreme Leader's guidance underwrites her discursive authority within the work-team, yet the film narrativizes this exceptional standing through humility rather than institutional privilege. Kangsam's record manipulation and reliance on informal networks reveal the survival repertoire of a lower-level manager whose physical collapse from appendicitis further shows that his failure is one of exhaustion, not evasion. Work-team members' glances, whispered complaints, and practical knowledge demonstrate that collective achievement is produced through informal coordination rather than immediate compliance. What the film sutures is not a simple opposition between structure and individual but the entangled complexity of work-team life, in which structural constraints and individual choices are inseparably intertwined. In doing so, it symptomatically exposes the very structural constraints—performance pressure, marginalized reproductive labor, and the exhaustion of lower-level managers—that its discourse of ownership consciousness is designed to conceal.

North Korean agricultural films, symptomatic reading, media adaptation, bunjo (work team), reproductive labor, performance pressure, informal networks, survival strategies

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