A Game for Every Season by Johann Skocek

Hana, dul, sed...: Football opens the heart, and when you win, like the North Korean women's national team, a new world opens up, and it stays with the players, even after the cheering has long since died down.

At the end, Ri Hyang Ok, the most beautiful of them, is asked what the beauty of football is. Ri played midfield for the North Korean women's national team. "I was the backbone," she describes her role. Several years have passed since her last appearance; after the defeat to Japan in qualifying for the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, Ri's football career came to an abrupt end. After that, she married and "found a place in life." Ri pauses. Behind her, on the panoramic window, lie the gray, rainy streets of Pyongyang. She spent hours talking about her time on the national team and what it was like to share both good and bad times with her friends. Now they rarely see each other, but every time, it's as if they were training together just yesterday.

The film Hana, dul, sed... (in English: "One, two, three...") tells two chapters in the life stories of four North Korean women, the "pioneers" of the national team. It took director and producer Brigitte Weich more than four years to even begin production on the film. In 2002, Weich attended the Pyongyang Film Festival, where two football films were being screened: France, We're Coming! by Michael Glawogger and The Game of Their Lives, a film about the famous North Korean team that ousted the Italians (with Facchetti!) from the 1966 World Cup in England. Someone told her that North Korea's women's team was superb. Her curiosity about the mysterious evil empire of North Korea was compounded by her fascination with a group of women pursuing a profession generally reserved for men in a petrified, patriarchal-totalitarian society. And with outstanding success, too!

Foreigners cannot work in North Korea; they cannot even move around the country. Weich secured the state film agency Korfilm as a partner, and more than four years after her initial application, she was allowed to attend a soccer match in North Korea. The regime's interest in projecting its self-image to the outside world paved the way for Weich and her camerawoman, Judith Benedikt, to enter the country.

Those who follow the team, which personifies the greatness of North Korea and demonstrates the generosity and wisdom of its great general, Kim Il-sung, drive along eight-lane boulevards, each with two cars moving along them. Posters evoke the constant vigilance in the fight against the archenemy, the United States, and the role of women, the "flower" of North Korea, "who care for the family." "As the thread follows the needle, so the woman follows the man," says the husband of a former national team player. They met through an agency, and after the wedding, she, the former star, will devote herself to the family.

Ra Mi Ae was a defender, and her family opposed her becoming a soccer player. Ten years ago, girls in North Korea couldn't run around in shorts, sweat, spit, and shout in public. But the great general saw the propaganda opportunity, and overnight, the team had perfect training facilities, extra food rations, and permits to travel to tournaments abroad. A few years later, North Korea defeated its "arch enemy" China in the final of the Asian Cup. The team evolved from a cause supported out of a sense of duty to the great leader to a cause dear to the hearts of the North Koreans.

Like ants, the comrades crawl around the titanic statue of the great general, whose right arm points prophetically into the distance. "Great ideology creates great times." This phrase from their great father, Kim Jong-il, serves as the film's motto. If soccer can be considered an ideology, it created great times for the players, their country, and their leader, whom they wanted to be "close to" and "please." Stone Age communism, with its dictatorial style, has failed all over the world. Individual development along Western lines is not possible, but the ambitious, individually assertive female soccer players are proof of this, even though they constantly harp on about their hopes of affection and recognition from their leader.

Some totalitarian regimes, like the mullah state of Iran, suppress football because they fear its emancipatory pull and its irreligious massification. Other systems, like the GDR, North Korea, or their counterparts from the USA to South Africa, promote it as a vehicle of national propaganda. This parallel world functions independently and independently of time, space, and environment, according to its own parameters, yet, like a magnifying glass, it directs our gaze onto the inner workings of society. Football is the most dramaturgically productive sporting production; it grants the individual creative freedom while binding them to a group; it rewards toughness and spontaneity equally; and, in its "house of hysteria," it invites emotions that are then immediately discarded or, as in North Korea, carried beyond the threshold of everyday life for the greater glory of the system.

"One is not born a woman, one becomes one," wrote Simone de Beauvoir. This probably applies to female footballers as well. After their careers end, they continue on the prescribed path of womanhood and companionship, which began with state-organized indoctrination and tenderness in kindergarten and ends as the flower of the people. Ri also pursued a career as an international referee.

Unlike all other sports, football is played on a large field, says Ri Hyang Ok. "So when you step onto this field, it's as if your heart expands and you can enter any world." When you run with that feeling, as if the whole world belongs to you, your heart opens. And when you then beat the other team – words can't describe what that feels like."