67
Rather than spend more time with the band, Traavik tries to milk additional drama from North Korea’s diplomatic tensions.
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What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
50
The Hollywood Reporter by Frank Scheck
The odd subject matter should have made for a riveting film, but, like many documentaries, Liberation Day (the title refers to the North Korean holiday celebrating the anniversary of the end of Japanese rule) feels both too short and too long.
60
The New York Times by Glenn Kenny
Liberation Day, a documentary of preparations for the concert directed by Mr. Traavik and Ugis Olte, is a consistently understated chronicle of Westerners who are very carefully playing with fire.
80
Billed as a “documentary musical,” this potential crowd-pleaser gets considerable comic mileage out of the friction between two very different brands of cultural eccentricity — but it succeeds as more than a diverting novelty, packed as it is with pointed observations on diplomacy and censorship in a country that’s still a mystery to many.
70
Los Angeles Times by Noel Murray
More detail about how this concert came to be — and what it means to both the performers and their patrons — would’ve made Liberation Day more illuminating, at least as a piece of journalism. But there’s a subtly meaningful power to what the film actually does.
80
The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw
The mystery remains: did the North Koreans get it? Did they not get it? Or did they choose a foggy condition of semi-incomprehension as the only state in which they could reconcile ideological piety with reaching out the hated west?
63
Slant Magazine by Peter Goldberg
Throughout, the documentary wavers between a sincere investigation of the avant-garde music group Laibach and self-satire.