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

The film’s official, Ms. K, has been emailing me regularly from Korfilm to coordinate the shoot. But she’s only vaguely aware of the video I’ve made to show the North Korean filmmakers. It features my actors and the gorgeous park we’re trying to save and is full of images of comfortable Sydney homes and pretty beaches, with sparkling exteriors of happy crowds. These are not the kinds of images the North Koreans usually see of the West, and I’ve chosen them deliberately. The regime has just arrested a Christian missionary for distributing Biblical pamphlets, and I know it will take a dim view of my thinly veiled attempt to counter the anti-Western propaganda Mr. Pak and his colleagues have been fed. I hide the video in a folder called “Self-Saucing Puddings” and stick a backup copy on a USB stick, concealed in the lid of a pen.

I knock on the wall to let Nic know it’s time. As we head down to the lobby to meet Sam, I am filled with the soothing conviction that there is nothing that can go wrong. I’m more prepared for this shoot than I’ve ever been in my life.

Sam is a Beijing-based Canadian who records international “posh docs” for National Geographic and Discovery. His website shows him in headphones, laughing and tanned, standing in exotic tropical locations surrounded by bikini-clad women. I hired him online after receiving a glowing recommendation from a soundman I worked with in Hong Kong. Despite Sam’s party-boy persona, he has been nothing but efficient for the past four weeks: hiring mics for our camera, sourcing battery-operated lights for Pyongyang’s power outages, and answering every email. In short, doing everything a soundman and fixer is supposed to do.

We step out of the lift, excited to be meeting our new collaborator in person. The lobby is empty, apart from a dirty figure in a hoodie, slumped in the corner. I check my watch: Sam must be late. When I look up, the hoodie is staggering towards us, pinprick pupils blazing in his chalky white face. “Let’s get this trip to butt-fuck-nowhere on the road,” he slurs and holds out a trembling hand. Sam, not to put too fine a point on it, is shit-faced. Nic and I pack our gear into his van, relieved that he’s had the foresight to hire a driver. Our first stop is the North Korean embassy, and all the way there, Sam keeps up a fast-paced babble about how he wants to get drunk in the Yangakkdo’s revolving restaurant, trash his room, and swim naked in the pool. When he asks Nicola if she brought her leopard-print bikini so they can have “an awesome time together,” it’s clear we have a problem.

In the embassy, we fill out forms under the cool gaze of a North Korean visa officer, and Sam can barely hold his pen. When I ask if he’s brought a passport photo, he explodes. “ What photo? You never told me I needed a fucking photo! Your whole outfit, lady, totally sucks. You got retards working for you in Australia. They’re fucking hopeless. You’re lucky you got a professional like me on board. No one ever told me about a photo. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!” Sam stomps up and down, frothing at the mouth. He’s having a full-blown meltdown, right there in the North Korean embassy—with armed guards outside, an increasingly inquisitive visa officer, and the Dear Leader smiling down from the wall. I calm Sam down enough to get him out of the building. He stumbles off to find an instant photo booth, agreeing to come back in half an hour.

I go back inside to find Nicola and the visa officer locked in a solemn face-off. I apologise as best I can for Sam’s behaviour: “He was anxious he might not get everything you need in time. And he has been very… sick.” The officer looks at me, poker-faced. Then, to our amazement, he stamps visas into all of our passports—and breaks into a huge grin. I guess no one’s behaved like that inside the North Korean embassy before. We skip out, eager to tell Sam the good news. But Sam and the van have vanished. With mounting horror, we list everything we left in the van: two expensive cameras, three North Korean plane tickets, all our travel documents, €55,000 in cash, and both our mobile phones. We have no choice but to stay where we are, and pray.

Two hours pass. The heat is horrific. Every time we try to sit under a tree on the kerb, the armed North Korean guard waves at us to stand. Just when we’ve decided the whole shoot is doomed, the van trundles back with everything inside. Bar Sam. We plead with the driver to take us to Sam’s house, and he refuses point blank. It costs me a lot of money, and a long argument involving handdrawn stick figures and a Chinese dictionary, to persuade him not to dump us back at the Red Hotel but take us instead to the gear-hire place, so we can pick up the lights.

I spend the rest of the afternoon leaving urgent messages on Sam’s voicemail. North Korean movies are post-dubbed, which means that no one in Pyongyang knows how to use a lapel mic, let alone a boom. With visas taking over four months to secure, it’s too late to find another sound recordist. We grab a coffee with Nick Bonner at Café Egypt, and he shares our alarm. He’s not going in this time, and won’t be there to protect us if anything goes wrong. I have a mental flash of Sam, high on God knows what, hurling himself from the top of the Yangakkdo to take a dip in the Taedong River, or dropping the F-bomb in front of the soldiers at the DMZ. Reluctantly, I agree with Nick that it is probably not wise to take a soundman on drugs into North Korea. Unless I can work some miracle, I am about to make a silent documentary in Pyongyang.

One hour before our flight, Sam still hasn’t made contact. Nic and I push three huge trolleys of gear up to the Air Koryo check-in desk, praying they’ll let us use Sam’s baggage allocation for the sound equipment we’ve had to hire. As we’re loading boxes onto the belt, Sam finally calls: to inform me, helpfully, that he isn’t “the right man for the job.” He is sober and full of remorse. Just before Nic and I got to Beijing, Sam explains, he received disturbing personal news from Canada and went on a three-day bender to cope. The fact he’s on an antidepressant called Paxil didn’t help: when mixed with alcohol, Paxil can make you psychotic. I hang up, cursing Big Pharma for damaging another crucial relationship in my life. I feel sorry for Sam; he seems decent. But thanks to him, I am going to a country that doesn’t record sync sound—without a sound recordist.

I’d sue Paxil if I thought it would make a difference. But somehow, I suspect the fact that Sam was about to shoot in North Korea had something to do with his meltdown. It’s that kind of place.

I SHOULDN’T BE SURPRISED: IN THE three hours it’s taken us to fly to Pyongyang, the formidable Ms. K has solved our sound problem.

Mr. Wang is stocky and assured, with a shaving plaster stuck to his chin. He has agreed to be trained as our boom swinger, and is the fourth member of our North Korean crew. He shakes our hands brusquely and introduces us to the other three: the handsome gaffer Mr. Q,; the taciturn driver from my last trip; and gum-chewing Sun Hi, our pretty new interpreter. Ms. K explains that Eun is too busy with the Pyongyang International Film Festival, and I am secretly relieved. Sun Hi has none of Eun’s too-cool-for-school languor. She’s alert and vibrant with a cheeky glint in her eyes. With her purple mascara and strappy sandals, Sun Hi could be just another K-pop-loving girl in Seoul. I wonder if she’d like the Wills and Kate stamp I smuggled in. “I am excited to make your film; it is crazy good!” she says, beaming, and I know she’ll love the stamp. As the men load our gear into the van, I decide to find a way to give it to her.