One girl would rather watch cartoons than do her homework. Another would rather play with friends than be at gymnastics practice. One barely touches her breakfast, and her mother admonishes her for not eating enough. Nothing extraordinary here, except that the girls, ages 11 and 13, live in North Korea.

“A State of Mind,” a documentary by British filmmaker Daniel Gordon, offers a rare glimpse into the daily lives of two North Korean schoolgirls as they prepare for the Mass Games, an athletic exercise in ideological unity of Olympic-sized proportions. The film, slated for fall premieres in select cities nationwide, features 93 minutes of footage of their mostly normal — eerily normal — lives.

“They’re exactly like you and I,” says Gordon, who lived in a North Korean hotel for nearly a year while filming, in a telephone interview from Sheffield, England. “There are people in North Korea who have a very, very different society and a very, very different belief structure, but underneath it all, there are an incredible amount of similarities. In talking with South Koreans, it’s kind of eerie how similar it is.”

Granted, the families featured in the film live in Pyongyang and are members of a more privileged group than their impoverished rural counterparts. The girls’ fathers have secure jobs. The families live in modest but relatively modern apartments, both furnished with television sets. They have enough to eat; at times, more than enough.

Hyon Sun and Song Yun (in front) practice for the Mass Games outside Kim Il Sung Stadium in Pyongyang. CREDIT: Photos courtesy of Kino International

The people interviewed on film also espouse the rhetoric that the West has come to expect from this regime. They believe that the whole world celebrates “Dear Leader” Kim Jong Il’s birthday. The passion with which they love their leader is matched only by their hatred of war-mongering Americans. The anti-American vitriol is voiced with abandon in elementary school classrooms, public spaces and private homes.

A North Korean speaks openly to a foreigner about how difficult it was to endure the “Arduous March,” a North Korean euphemism for the famine that killed more than 2 million people in the 1990s. It is believed to be the first such recorded interview about the famine.

But the focal point of the documentary is the girls’ preparation for the big day, when Pak Hyon Sun, 13, and Kim Song Yun, 11, perform with thousands of others at the Mass Games. They are giddy and nervous all at once about the prospect of performing for the “Dear General,” Kim Jong Il. They spend countless hours training, practicing, perfecting — often at the expense of their studies, much to one teacher’s chagrin — and sometimes they’re so nervous they can’t eat.

Hyon Sun (left) and Song Yon had their day-to-day lives documented by British filmmaker Daniel Gordon for “A State of Mind.” CREDIT: Photos courtesy of Kino International

The Mass Games, held periodically in Pyongyang, involves more than 100,000 performers, all of them dressed in dazzlingly bright colors, all of them in sync — down to the second. The games are the penultimate means to inculcating in each performer the ethos of group over individual; individual will is subsumed to that of the collective good. It is groupthink in action.