‘Bright Future’ review: Romanian documentary revisits 1989 Pyongyang Festival of Youth and Students

Dir/scr: Andra MacMasters. Romania/South Korea. 2024. 89mins

The idealistic glow of the past is viewed with the advantage of hindsight in Bright Future. Andra MacMasters’ inventive, thought-provoking documentary is a time-capsule snapshot of 1989 as revealed through the 13th World Festival of Youth and Students held that year in the North Korea capital of Pyongyang. The sense of optimism at the event reflected a fast-changing world, but MacMasters digs deeper to convey the conflicts, contradictions and uncertainties bubbling below the surface. The expert use of archive material has seen Bright Future named best debut feature in Transilvania’s Romanian Days section, the latest stop on a healthy festival run.

Inventive, thought-provoking documentary

World affairs reached a significant turning point in 1989. The Berlin Wall fell, student protesters entered Tiananmen Square and revolutions cast aside communist regimes across Eastern Europe. Bright Future begins in the sweltering summer of that year, five months before the Romanian Revolution and the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu. A Romanian delegation of 150 sets out to attend the World Festival of Youth and Students as guests of honour to mark the close friendship between Ceausescu and North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Il-sung.

MacMasters’ film is built around VHS footage shot by attendee Emilian Urse between July 1989 and March 1990, which captures a vivid sense of an event attended by 22,000 delegates from 177 countries. On the evidence presented, it was a grandiose hybrid of Olympic Games, Eurovision and summer camp offering cultural activities, sporting events, demonstrations, debates and endless opportunities to celebrate the festival’s call for ”anti-imperialist solidarity, peace and friendship”. The intentions are serious, but no opportunity is missed to don national costume, sing, dance or revel in the carefully choreographed pageantry.

MacMasters provides context on the festival and previous gatherings in Warsaw, Helsinki and Berlin, where guests had included Che Guevara and Black Panther activist Angela Davis. She notes that the 1957 festival in Moscow boosted the local birthrate and signalled the arrival of rock ’n’ roll in Russia. Little ironies are woven through a film in which can be felt MacMasters’ affection for the young delegates, but also her appreciation of some of the event’s absurdities. Urse’s camera has a feel for the humanity of the gathering: the smiling welcomes, the gestures of friendship, the photo opportunities, the game participants straying outside their comfort zone or beyond what might have been permissible on their home territory.

The issues raised at Pyongyang covered a wide spectrum, from the monitoring of human-rights abuses to building a consensus opposing weapons of mass destruction, worries over climates change, solidarity with Palestine, the legacy of colonialism and support for women’s rights in countries that tried to deny them. In retrospect, it often feels as if everything has changed and nothing has changed. The irony, of course, is that many of the countries represented were guilty of the very abuses their young citizens were railing against. MacMasters emphasises that with testimony supplied by Unesco, The New York Times, Romania’s Ministry of Affairs and others, which is narrated by actors. 

Bright Future does feel a little rambling and unfocused in its later stages, but is no less fascinating for that. Hindsight suggests how naive some people were in their attempts to change the world. It is all too easy to see progress as a steady march when recent times have proved advances can be reversed or challenged. MacMasters nevertheless ends on a moment of hope, the dawn for Romanians of a new life after Ceausescu, when the world felt full of possibilities and the future seemed genuinely bright.