Four performers, one director's camera and 79 minutes: Blackpink: Light Up the Sky is a 2020 music documentary from South Korea in which Lisa, Rosé, Jisoo and Jennie tell the story of their group in their own words.
What is Blackpink: Light Up the Sky about?
Caroline Suh's documentary sits down with the members of BLACKPINK, the record-breaking Korean girl group, and asks them to look back on how they got here. Each of the four talks about the ambitions she carried into the music business and about the long, demanding stretch of work that came before the public heard a single song. Those personal accounts are set beside the sheer scale of the group's success, so the stadium-sized image and the private effort behind it are seen side by side. The result is built as a portrait more than as a performance film: what matters is how the women describe their own rise, and what that rise asked of them.
About the cast
The documentary is carried by the four members themselves, Lisa, Rosé, Jisoo and Jennie, who appear as themselves and give the film its voice. Teddy Park is also credited among the on-screen participants, and Caroline Suh directs. Because this is non-fiction, nobody is playing a character. What the viewer gets is each woman's own account, and the differences in how the four of them talk about the same years are a large part of what the film has to offer.
Context & significance
Music documentaries about working pop acts usually come in two kinds: the tour film that records the show, and the profile that tries to explain the people on the stage. Light Up the Sky belongs to the second kind. It arrived in 2020, when Korean pop had already found a worldwide audience, and it gave viewers outside Korea a way into a group whose songs they might know without knowing much about the performers. A running time of 79 minutes keeps it compact, and its two genre labels, documentary and music, describe it accurately: it is as much about work and ambition as it is about songs. Fans will find a record of a particular moment in the group's history; newcomers will find a clear introduction.
Watching Blackpink: Light Up the Sky on Ktime
Blackpink: Light Up the Sky is in the K-Time catalogue. Reading this page is free, while playing the film requires signing in with a K-Time account. K-Time is made for Persian-speaking viewers around the world, with a Farsi interface alongside English, so browsing is comfortable in either language. No Persian dub or Persian subtitle track is listed for this title at the moment.