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

Which is how I ended up a bundle of self-pitying misery on the night of my fortieth birthday, buried under the duvet with a pile of wet tissues. My future consisted of cold pizza in the edit suite for two more horrendous months, watching my darlings hit the cutting-room floor. My present was ten minutes away in a cab, in a room full of pogo-dancing friends—whom I was too sick to join. I wished, pathetically, I hadn’t told them not to bring gifts. At least I could have been unwrapping them now and reading their cards, feeling I was there with them in spirit.

Thankfully, one friend had ignored me. An old mate from drama school, who had abandoned the Tinseltown dreams we shared to navigate the cutthroat world of factual TV, becoming a top current affairs producer. Just before I’d vomited and left my own party, she’d slipped a paper bag into my hands, with a conspiratorial whisper: “I bought it in Pyongyang.” My friend had just made an exposé on North Korea’s human-rights abuses. I didn’t expect her gift to be uplifting.

Weakly, I tore open the bag. Out slid a discreet brown book, its title embossed in gold:

Below that, in smaller gold letters:

No picture, no back-cover blurb. The simplicity made it seem profound, like a Bible. I opened the tissue-thin pages. At the top of each page, in case one might forget the reason the Dear Leader had put pen to paper in the first place, was the clarion call that lost its power in the West back when Thatcher broke the Yorkshire Unions in 1984:

But stamped on this elegant little book, the words seemed strangely genuine. Romantic, even, to my aging inner punk—who had spent her twenties steeped in Marx and Billy Bragg, raging against the encroaching evils of Thatcherism in a Sex Pistols kind of fury.

I traced the shiny gold letters on the cover, imagining red-star-capped workers applying them on a hand-cranked printing press, somewhere in the nostalgic half-light of the last “pure” socialist nation on earth.

I felt uplifted. I thanked my friend. Then I went to sleep and forgot all about it.

TWO YEARS LATER, I WAS LEANING against a muddy tractor tyre, high on marijuana in a Missouri paddock.

Thanks to the recut, and to everyone’s surprise, Forbidden Lie$ was a success. While it hadn’t made the hallowed screens of Cannes, it scored a respectable run in the cinemas, TV sales around the world, and a two-year tour on the festival circuit, where it was showered with prizes. I succumbed happily to the junket, presenting the film to Gaultier-clad Italians in the Renzo Piano cinema in Rome, sipping cardamom coffee with oil sheiks at the Al Jazeera Documentary Festival in Qatar, devouring shashlicks in the beautiful dachas of a Russian province called Tatarstan—which I am still not quite sure exists, despite my passport saying I’ve been there.

I was lost in a haze of adulation and hotel buffets. Lie$ had exposed the clichés propagated by the mainstream about the Middle East, and humanised Muslims in my audiences’ minds. The Arabs were grateful, and the Americans were intrigued. I had shown people that the streets of Amman, with their happy families and promenading couples, were not that different from downtown New York. That this culture, which Norma had portrayed as a prison, was layered and complex—and that Jordanian women, many of whom didn’t wear burqas, had degrees, and could travel at will, were as free as the women of Iraq had been—until Operation Shock and Awe blasted them back to the Stone Age.

My film masqueraded as the portrait of a con artist, but it was really about the nature of truth in the post-9/11 era. People walked out questioning everything: not just Norma’s book and the Pentagon spin emanating from the Bruckheimer-designed sets of the Central Command in Doha, but the truth of documentary itself. I jetted around in a business-class bubble, high on hubris and champagne, riding the zeitgeist. I had changed the way people saw things. I had done something good. I couldn’t wait for Michael Moore and Errol Morris to call and embrace me as their long-lost bastard child.

But they didn’t call—and as I leant against that muddy tractor tyre in Missouri, sharing a joint with the filmmakers of the True/False Film Festival, I had an unpleasant realisation. I had no new project. Filmmaker Alex Gibney, his Oscar for Taxi to the Dark Side still warm in his pocket, was enthralling us with the details of a new film he was making on Julian Assange, and I had zip. Two years had passed, the invitations were drying up, and I was doomed to return to the Australian film industry, which tends to operate on the perverse logic that if you’ve won awards, you’re too “up yourself” to employ. If I was going to make another film, I’d have to produce it myself.

The Sydney I returned to was not an inspiring place for an independent in need of finance. The bus stops I trudged past on the way to investor meetings hawked Hollywood’s latest 3D blockbusters. Box sets of Mad Men and Breaking Bad were wowing the home-viewer crowd. In the city’s last art-house cinema, punters were avoiding Australian films like the plague. Drama directors were churning out thrillers about serial killers and monster crocs to break into the US genre market. Local documentaries, written off by distributors as “boring,” were being straightjacketed into banal confections for the cardigan-wearing faithful of the ABC. Anything about World War I, trout fishing, or fusion food was getting up on prime time. Anything else was a very tough sell.

I retreated to the 7 p.m. news, seeking comfort in the misery of others. This was a mistake. The same free-market greed that had destroyed the audience for Australian films by pitting them against Hollywood’s bloated marketing budgets had taken steroids, morphed into Mega-Godzilla, and was plundering the globe. Petrol tankers were breaking apart on pristine reefs. McDonald’s was sparking an obesity crisis in India. A mining conglomerate hired guards to shoot Indonesian farmers armed with shovels, so it could plunder their hills for gold. Whales, deafened by sonar testing, were beaching themselves wherever Big Oil put its rigs. A fat cop blasted Occupy Wall Street protesters with capsicum spray and thousands of Facebook sympathisers, too jaded to get off the couch, pasted “Pepper Spray Cop” onto Pink Floyd album covers—circulating it as a harmlessly subversive meme.

My own sunburnt country, with its fragile creatures and ancient caves, was Open for Business. Miners were dredging the seagrass paddocks of the gentle dugong to build the Gorgon gas mine. Drought-stricken farmers were flogging land to Chinese agribusinesses and the GM fanatics of Monsanto. Loggers were pulping Tasmania’s old-growth forests, the last habitat of the Tassie devil, for the Asian paper market. The Mandarin-speaking prime minister, Kevin Rudd, who had swept to victory calling climate change “the greatest moral challenge of our time,” was busy protecting Big Coal. Along the murderous highways, floral tributes hung from telegraph poles in memory of people killed by road-trains—but the only new railway was a Halliburton-backed freight link that ran straight up to the Ranger uranium mine. You just had to follow the money to see that Cheney and his cohorts would make a killing once the yellowcake was out of the ground.

I looked on in despair. I had capitalism malaise. I had plummeted from photocalls to life in a tracksuit: the universal uniform of the freelancer “between projects.” I slid into obscurity, as Sydney, the brassy tart, raked in the dollars. The city’s thousand-strong branch of the Occupy movement had shrunk down to a few sodden students in sleeping bags, who bleated slogans at multinationals moving into Martin Place to cash in on the boom. In my little inner-city suburb of Erskineville, developers were about to tear down the possum-filled trees to build 24-storey tower blocks for five thousand new residents. This instant concrete jungle was landing in our backyards with no plans to fix the already inadequate trains, overcrowded schools, and gridlocked traffic.