Pyongyang supplies most of what the camera sees: a workforce presented as unanimously loyal, and interview subjects, among them a biologist and a group of factory workers, describing genuine enthusiasm for what they call the "Grand Marshal," Kim Jong-un. The film treats North Korea as a nearly seventy-year social experiment and lets its subjects narrate that experiment on camera, including their sense that the state's controls amount to protection rather than restriction. It also documents the regime's harder edges: the prison system, and the 2013 execution of Kim Jong-un's uncle Jang Song-thaek and his family. A staged "victory parade" celebrates a claimed military triumph over the United States, while a colonel named Kim Chang Yun gives a tour of the DMZ and describes a five-meter wall built in 1979, which he blames on the US and South Korea for blocking reunification. The film also follows the lottery system that occasionally reunites families split by the border, one of the few moments where the propaganda gives way to something plainly human.