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

The woman pulls a remote control from her hanbok and activates an LCD screen on the wall. Slides of an unusually frail Kim Jong Il play in silence: trying on the Hana Center headphones, inspecting the Hana Center DVD machine, standing with the Hana Center workers on the steps, supported by his minions.

The woman looks at us sadly: “The Dear Leader took off his glove to inspect our computer.” A close-up of a tattered glove appears on the screen, haloed in gold as if it’s the Shroud of Turin. “The glove was old, with a hole in one finger. Our Great Leader was so modest, he did not even think to buy new gloves. We were so filled with gratitude, we sang for him, with all our hearts and souls. When we heard that he passed away on his train the next day, we could not believe it.” The woman starts to tremble, racked with grief. She seems utterly genuine. “There will never be another Leader like him again, in the entire history of the world,” she sobs, her voice rising in a tremulous crescendo. “He is the greatest and most noble Leader that ever lived.” The slideshow ends, and a sentence appears, decorated with roses: “My first love is music—Kim Jong Il .” The words reflect back at us, upside down, from the polished floor. I line up a shot, but Ms. K stops me. The Dear Leader’s name, when inverted, cannot not be filmed.

The woman dabs her eyes and guides us to a padded door. Inside is a tiny cinema with red velvet seats. The seat in the middle of the front row is covered in a silk slip. “This is the very seat the Dear Leader sat in on that day,” says the woman gravely. We sit on either side of it, and the lights start to dim. “This is the last music he ever heard,” she says, and curtains silently part on the wall, revealing the Vienna Philharmonic, playing—of all things—a Strauss waltz. The orchestra sits on the flower-bedecked stage of the Musikverein, where Austria’s famous New Year’s Day concert is held each year—ever since the Nazis established it in 1939.

After twenty minutes of watching conductor Franz Welser-Möst coaxing his bejewelled audience into a synchronized clapping frenzy, I’ve had enough. The parallels between Hitler and Kim Jong Il are already horribly apparent—but now I have to endure identically clapping Austrians behaving as if they’re in the Pyongyang mass games. I look hopefully at our guide—maybe she’ll let us go? But she ignores me, staring at the screen in rapture. Clearly, you don’t walk out on the last song the Dear Leader heard. Especially not when it is by a favourite composer of the Third Reich.

Two hours later, our ears still ringing to a Viennese 3/4 beat, we’re back in the van. Ms. K has cancelled our last stop, at the Juche Tower: the lift isn’t working, and we’re running out of time. If we go there now, we won’t make it back to the hotel before the 7 p.m. curfew. That’s when civilian vans and cars have to be off the roads, and the army trucks take over. I slump in the back, annoyed. The Juche Tower is Pyongyang’s Statue of Liberty: the lift takes you as high as the flame. It would have been the perfect vantage point from which to shoot panoramic wides of the city, with its Cheshire Cat portraits of Kim Jong Il. They won’t be there much longer: the propaganda workers of the Mansudae Art Studio have already been instructed to paint one thousand new portraits of Kim Jong Un.

The traffic lady conducts us through the lights, and we waltz around her with the bicyclists in perfect formation, like Kubrick’s gliding satellites in 2001 . I have the irritating sensation that I’m still stuck in “The Blue Danube.” I don’t know if it’s the fact that I dislike waltzes almost as much as musicals, or if it’s the strange, searing pain in my stomach. But either way, I’m fed up with being polite. We pull onto the overpass heading back to the Yangakkdo, and there, in the baking dirt, are the children again, flashing their placards. I whip out my camera and shove it against the glass, grabbing every frame. I don’t care if Ms. K notices.

Sure enough, she clocks me in the rear-view mirror, and frowns. Nick calls out from the front: “Anna, that’s not a good idea…” but I just grunt and keep filming. The kids have gone, and now I’m brazenly capturing whatever I can: ladies on bicycles, soldiers in flatbed utes, those maddening mugshots of Kim Jong Il, smiling his Pepsodent smile.

Ms. K mutters something to Nick. He mutters back. I keep on filming. “Rabbits!” Nick calls out again. I ignore him. The tension in the van would make the DMZ feel like a yoga retreat.

“Nick,” says Lizzette, a little too brightly, “do you think we could have a quick coffee?”

NICK, LIZZETTE, AND I SIT IN the revolving restaurant at the top of the Yangakkdo. Nick and Lizzette are eating grey mullet soup. I can’t manage anything stronger than lemonade. The dreaded Pyongyang belly has got me. I boiled water for my coffee this morning but forgot to use it to brush my teeth. Now, after our day of fake mud huts and Strauss, I am sick and faint, struggling to stay upright between dashes to the loo. Nick has thoughtfully chosen the banquette closest to the Ladies. If it weren’t for the Imodium tablets, I’d be passed out in my room.

Ms. K is not with us, thanks to some deft diplomacy by Lizzette. It’s our first time alone with Nick since we got here. After two days of doublespeak, we are desperate to debrief. Diarrhoea is not the only thing causing me pain: I’m frustrated with the constant surveillance and the orders not to film. Pyongyang is the most photogenic set I’ve ever stepped inside, but every time I pull out my camera, I feel like a criminal. A thousand extraordinary images have already passed me by. Now they are lost forever. It hurts.

Nick urges me to be patient. Ms. K is playing her cards close to her chest, but she wants our film to happen. She’s not protecting North Korea; she’s protecting our chances of getting back in. It’s vital she knows she can trust me. Listening to Nick repeat what he said back in Beijing, I feel like a recalcitrant child. I should rein in my ego, stop being a diva, and simply cooperate. But the more Ms. K tries to stop me, the more I want to shoot. I guess that’s why I make documentaries and not drama: the thrill of capturing the illicit is in my blood.

I sip my lemonade and look down at Pyongyang’s impenetrable sprawl. Like everything else in this topsy-turvy place, the revolving restaurant is not what it seems: the only things moving are the windows. This creates the illusion that you are spinning around the city, but the view never changes. Then again, I could be wrong: we might be rotating, but so slowly I can’t tell. One guidebook I’ve read says the restaurant really does revolve, but stops before it reaches the part of the city the regime doesn’t want you to see. That would be the starving part, the ugly part—the part that, so far, I have seen nothing to indicate exists.

I remember the resolution I made yesterday, to keep an open mind. Nick knows his country better than I ever will: this precious window of unmonitored face time is my one chance to grill him. I start with the hostess on the Air Koryo flight: why was she interrogating me? Is she a spy? Next, what are the pipes that belch smoke all over the city every morning? Then there’s the anti-Soviet joke Mr. Ri told at the banquet: if he’s cynical enough to bag the Russians, surely he can see through the propaganda he’s being fed at home? And why was Mr. Pak openly speaking Japanese, if he believes the official line about the imperialist enemy? I move on to the women we saw on the lawn: are they so hungry, they have to eat grass to survive? And finally, what about those six-year-olds under the overpass, who looked like they hadn’t moved since yesterday? Surely being made to squat in the baking dirt for hours on end is not “training,” but child abuse?