Anna Broinowski - Aim High in Creation! - A One-of-a-Kind Journey Inside North Korea's Propaganda Machine

Now we’re in Pyongyang, the plan feels woefully naive. The kind of thing Maxwell Smart might try, then ruin by blowing up his shoe. I imagine Nicola and me swooning on the red banquettes in the cafe, proclaiming ourselves “terrifically tired” in our best Julie Andrews accents, as Ms. K and her taciturn driver look coolly on. They judge you by your face over here—and, no doubt, your voice. But we’re stuck with the plan now. We can no longer discuss it out loud.

I reach for my moisturiser, persuading myself I’ll never have to lie to the formidable Ms. K, then stop. There’s a note, sitting on top of the washcloth I used yesterday. It is still covered in the foundation I smeared off my face, the tan streaks hardened to a dark, crusty brown. On the note, a single word: NO. I’m horrified. Do the Yangakkdo’s cleaners think I’m such a decadent capitalist that I took a dump then wiped my arse on their washcloth? I scrawl a note on the other side of the paper, setting it next to my foundation bottle with a helpful arrow: Makeup ! I add a little smiley face. I hope it works.

In the lift down, Nicola and I stand beside five crisply pressed Party workers, the Dear Leader’s beaming face pinned to their lapels. The workers glance furtively at our Sony camera box, our polyurethane tripod, the titanium light stands in their Gore-Tex bags. All alien materials, in a country that still uses seventies-era plastics. Eighteen silent minutes later, the lift doors grind open, and we’re hovering thirty centimetres above the lobby’s polished floor. No one flinches. The bellboys lean in and force the doors open with a practised heave, and Ms. K greets us, all smiles. We’re on time.

The van coasts along the bridge to the city, and Nicola and I exchange a grin. It was surprisingly easy to retrieve our passports from the check-in lady. She behaved as if such a thing were perfectly normal, that we could even keep them in our rooms if we like. We hand them over to Ms. K, without comment. Maybe she needs them to show the guards at the film studio. It is not wise to quiz Ms. K too closely about security. She has worked backroom miracles to get us permission to roll as much tape as we like, in a country that regularly sends tourists on the early plane back to China simply for having filmed the Dear Leader’s statue at the wrong angle. Silent acquiescence is the best way to preserve the precious access we’ve been given.

Suddenly, Ms. K barks something at the driver. A thin man in a safari suit is running towards us, leaping over bushes to reach the van. The driver screeches to a stop, and Ms. K pushes our passports through the window. The man grabs them and ducks back into the bushes. The van accelerates before we can process what has happened. We twist around, watching the man’s retreating head in disbelief, as it bobs over the bushes and disappears into the foliage under the diminishing Yangakkdo.

“Our passports, where are they going?” I ask Ms. K, lamely. She nods with enthusiasm. “Okay! Let us go to April 25 Military Film Studio! They are waiting!” Nicola and I exchange a look. “But… Ms. K? When do we get our passports back?” I try again. Ms. K sighs and examines her cuticles. She mutters something to the driver. He laughs and toots at an office lady on a bike. She swerves out of the way, shooting me daggers as we pass. I look at Nic. She’s wearing her most inscrutable keep-calm-and-carry-on expression. It’s a look she perfected while filming a sniper battle in Baghdad from a stalled American tank.

I stare out the window, battling a rising helplessness, as we glide along Yonggwang Street. Past its fluttering North Korean flags, its hand-painted propaganda posters of soldiers and peasant women clenching their fists against the lilac sky. I watch an ancient woman slowly sweeping a leafless pavement with a broom made of sticks, and try to forget that right now, I am in the world’s most isolated nation, with a guide who won’t answer me, a driver who can’t understand me, and an itinerary I have no certainty will happen.

I am making a film about a man who convinced his people to believe he was God, murdered those who didn’t, and routinely kidnapped foreigners, to fulfill his dreams of world supremacy.

And now, I have no passport.

Ms. K swivels round cheerfully: “Soon we will arrive at the April 25 Military Film Studio. April 25 is the auspicious day our Supreme Generalissimo Kim Il Sung led the glorious People’s Uprising on Jeju Island against the imperialist Japs. You must only film inside. No filming out the window. At all.” Ms. K flashes me her half-rueful smile. If I wasn’t so intent on smiling back, I might even be scared.

IT ALL STARTED WITH A BIRTHDAY present. In 2009, my partner threw a fondue party for my fortieth, in the film school where he worked. The loveable renegades, jokesters, and other unflushables I’d collected over the years snuck in at midnight and stood around steaming cauldrons, forks in hand, dripping strings of Jarlsberg on the pristine carpet.

Vodka was drunk and lascivious toasts exchanged. The event descended rapidly, as it should, into a retro-punk free-for-all involving pogo dancing to the Sex Pistols and scrums on the marshmallow-smeared floor. By the time the cauldrons were licked clean and filled with brandied chocolate, my mates were paddle-whipping anyone who dropped their strawberry in the sauce, and condemning repeat offenders to sing AC/DC, naked, on the film-school roof.

That’s what I heard, anyway. I wasn’t there. I was back home under my duvet, nursing the Battlestar Galactica of flus. My immune system was shot by six months’ hard labour in an edit suite, making a film about a Chicago impostor called Norma Khouri. Had I known Norma’s twisted tale would lead me to Kim Jong Il, I might have thought twice about getting involved with her. She was a dark and doe-eyed beauty, and according to many people I’d interviewed, a truly dangerous dame.

When I started tracking Norma, she was on the lam from the FBI for a reported $1 million worth of fraud. One Chicago gumshoe had spent fifteen years trying to nail her for a string of alleged scams, including an old woman whose signature she claimed Norma had forged to pilfer her life’s savings; a businessman who’d given Norma a building, believing she was an “Arab princess” who wanted to house the poor; and a sorry legion of love-struck putzes whom Norma had apparently seduced into proposing marriage, then smoothly milked of their assets.

There were also dubious insurance claims involving Norma’s mother-in-law, and her husband John—a sushi-loving playboy with rumoured ties to the Greek mafia and a penchant for white leather shoes. But what had really frightened me was the meeting I’d had with a detective from the Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, who told me, over key lime pie on an Illinois beltway, that he believed Norma was potentially implicated in the shooting murder of John’s tennis partner at a gas station in broad daylight. That bit I left out of the film. Norma’s tendency to mention guns in every interview I recorded with her had me spooked.

“Norma’s got more brains than John and his mother put together. She’s the best con artist operating today,” the gumshoe told me bitterly. True to form, Norma had given the FBI the slip—hopping into a taxi to O’Hare Airport with no one but the gumshoe in hot pursuit, and flying to Athens, where—according to one Chicago cop I spoke with—she lived with John and their two kids until the American statute of limitations under which she could be arrested expired. With bills to pay and no Greek, Norma used her Mensa-level IQ to forge a lucrative new career. She sat in an Internet cafe, surrounded by teenagers blasting Arabs to smithereens on Conflict: Desert Storm II, and tapped out a fake first-person memoir.