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

Gradually, the wives’ fates shift: the happy wife’s husband fancies the singer and starts to neglect his work. Meanwhile, the deadbeat husband reveals he’s been working on a top-secret project to help North Korea cut its dependency on foreign oil. He unveils his invention and becomes a national hero, praised by Kim Jong Il himself. The singer realises she’s been wrong about her husband and embraces him in their newly furnished flat. Next door, the once-happy wife has driven her husband to drink, thanks to her relentless nagging to keep up with the Joneses. The message is clear: he who sacrifices personal happiness for the good of the nation will be rewarded; he who pursues his own selfish ambitions is doomed. But Two Families is not heavy-handed; it is lightly acted, simply shot, and surprisingly funny.

One down, twenty-one to go. So far, so good. This is no more gruelling than watching back-to-back episodes of Seinfeld —and a lot more novel. I pick up The Country I Saw , by the white-haired Pak. It’s a box set: part two was made this year, part one twenty years ago. The prequel stars a humble Japanese professor who teaches North Korean politics in Tokyo. Determined to find out what has become of North Korea since he fought there in the war, the professor travels to Pyongyang. There he meets a mysterious stranger (Yurim), who guides him through the country’s miraculous postwar prosperity. Yurim seems familiar, but the professor can’t work out why. Then he realises Yurim is one of the soldiers he brutally interrogated during the war. The professor is astonished: Yurim has not only forgiven him, but wants to share with him the utopian joy of Juche. The professor returns to Tokyo and broadcasts North Korea’s brilliance to the world.

Part two is a different beast: better shots, tighter editing, and a plot that is more political thriller than history lesson. Pak continues his theme of North Korea seen through a stranger’s eyes—this time with the professor’s daughter. She’s also an academic, but her world is more dangerous than her father’s. South Korean spies on motorbikes are constantly harassing her and her elderly mother outside their Tokyo apartment, and a rival academic is attacking her for being too “pro–North Korea.” But the professor’s daughter knows injustice when she sees it: George W. Bush has just labelled North Korea a failed state and is preparing to destroy it, like he destroyed Iraq. The professor’s daughter must uncover the truth about North Korea’s nuclear program to counter America’s propaganda, before it’s too late.

Dramatic scenes of pursuit and espionage follow—some shot in the places we saw today: the Yangakkdo lobby (as Tokyo airport), the lawns of Mangyongdae (as a Japanese golf course), and Kim Il Sung Square, where the professor’s daughter learns about Juche. As she runs through the revolving doors of our hotel, chased by South Korean agents, you can see Simon Sheen bumping against his glass, and the bellboys in crazy nineties tracksuits and blond wigs, looking like extras from a Wes Anderson movie. The professor’s daughter flees to Tokyo and gives a passionate speech supporting North Korea’s nuclear program, intercut with detonating American nukes: “The Dear Leader proved that the DPRK was invincible,” she says to her awestruck students. “Kim Jong Il no longer had to go to the world. The world came to Kim Jong Il.” Cue the photo of Madeleine Albright and Kim Jong Il shaking hands in Banquet Hall Number One, like Tweedledum and Tweedledee. A crane soars triumphantly against a red dawn, and the credits roll. Conclusion: nukes, good; America, evil; the UN nuclear-disarmament program, hypocritical bullshit.

I lie back, exhausted. Pak hasn’t just laid on his propaganda with a trowel; he’s used a cement mixer. Here’s the story of North Korea’s nukes, from the other side of the looking glass. But watching it in the same country Pak made it in, only six months ago, I find myself in his shoes. Why shouldn’t the North Koreans defend themselves, when their enemy is a nuclear superpower itching to avenge itself for an embarrassing and unresolved war? Why shouldn’t the North Koreans do everything in their power to stop the US from imposing its free-world “democracy” on their country, if it means that multinationals can come in and plunder their pristine hills for riches and take them all back out? How would I feel if the leader of my country, no matter how much of an arsehole he was, was strung up by foreigners and shot? The Kims may be bastards, but they’re the North Koreans’ bastards. And if America can maintain close to five thousand active nuclear warheads, why can’t the North Koreans even have one?

I am feeling indignant on Pak’s behalf. His kindness has made me want to defend him, just like Dennis Rodman defended Kim Jong Un when he returned from their first “basketball diplomacy” playdate in 2013. “People respect him and his family,” Rodman told ABC News ’s disbelieving anchor. “I sat with him for two days. And he wants Obama to do one thing: Call him . He said, ‘Dennis, I don’t want to do war.’ He loves basketball. Obama loves basketball. Let’s start there. The kid’s twenty-eight years old. He’s not his dad. He’s not his grandpa. He’s very humble, man. He loves power, because of his dad. But you know what, dude? He’s a good guy too. I don’t condone what he does, but he’s my friend.”

Rodman was slammed, of course. Just as I will be, when I try to humanise the North Koreans in my film and make the case for cultural diplomacy over military threats and sanctions. Then I remember why: North Korea is evil. It oppresses its people. It puts them in gulags. Nothing it does can be justified. The problem with that theory is that, so far, I’ve seen no evidence of oppression. And I’ve had the same access as many of my journalist colleagues. “Remember, the people in Pyongyang are the lucky ones,” Lizzette says gently, and I know she’s right. We’ll never meet the twenty-two million others, living beyond this deceptively beautiful city in God-knows-what-kinds of hell. But we can go to their villages—through these films.

I grab another, hoping it’s been shot outside Pyongyang. We’re in luck. Urban Girl Gets Married is the opposite of Pak’s atom-bomb thriller: a frothy rural rom-com about star-crossed lovers. Girl meets Boy; Girl hates Boy; Boy woos Girl; they fall in love. Think Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks in You’ve Got Mail , or Julia Roberts and Richard Gere in Pretty Woman —but this time, it’s the man who is poor. The heroine of Urban Girl is an uppity Pyongyang dress designer, forced to work on a communal farm as part of her company’s annual community-service trip. The hero is a humble duck herder, who thinks the heroine’s airs and graces are hilarious. As she shovels shit in the rice paddies, his ducks keep stepping on her beautiful drawings and splattering her dresses with mud. She hates him and his hideous ducks on sight. He thinks she’s adorable.

The film is kitsch and fun, with poppy synth music and crazy freeze-frames. The airbrushed village is pristine and pre-digital, like the one outside the Pyongyang Film Studio. No one is fat; no one is starving; everyone is happy. But the film is too saccharine to sit through in full: there’s only so much choreographed group singing in paddocks you can take without gagging. We fast-forward to the end, feeling like naughty schoolgirls. And sure enough, the heroine is now wearing a peasant smock and singing a tune of socialist joy to the duck herder, flanked by a brass band of her delighted Pyongyang colleagues. She’s decided to work beside him in the ditches. He’s taught her that pretty frocks are too bourgeois for a true daughter of Juche. “Tra la la la,” they all sing, “we’re all happy socialists with nothing to envy; the Dear Leader is the greatest leader in the world; tra la la, look at the plump potatoes we grew,” etc., etc., the end.