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

It’s mesmerising, like watching a real North Korean movie. Ms. Yun has the magnetic intensity of the ill-fated heroine in A Broad Bellflower . I feel strangely inspired seeing Ms. Yun and Ri Yon Chol battling out the coal seam gas issue on this remote Pyongyang hill, light-years away from the capitalist system that spawned it. “Cut!” Pak says, content. “That’s how you do it,” he says, nodding at me. I can’t say the same for the dictator who trained him, but my mentor is a genius.

The artistry of our North Korean colleagues continues to dazzle us for the rest of the afternoon. Composer Mr. Pei, who has been rehearsing his rewritten version of the gardener’s song for days, greets us outside the Pyongyang opera centre, which has an armed guard stationed somewhat pointlessly in front of its wide open doors. We follow him inside, expecting to be led to a small studio, where a few violinists, maybe even a quartet, will bring his composition to life. Instead, Pei ushers us into a five-hundred-seat auditorium.

A full 150-piece orchestra, in concert tuxedos, are tuning their instruments on stage. A woman in a black silk dress strums a gold harp, and an equally elegant woman waits at a grand piano. Pei takes a seat in the dress circle, fiddling with his glasses. “We put a lot of heart into this, because it’s the first time an Australian director has come to work with us,” he says, apprehensive. “We put more effort into it than we normally do.”

Pak nods at the conductor. The lights dim, and a majestic singer in an apricot hanbok glides out from the wings. The conductor wafts his baton in the air, and delicately, the orchestra begins. It’s the first time I wish our soundman had not exploded in Beijing. There is no mixing desk to plug into, and our boom and lapel mics are incapable of capturing the grandeur of Pei’s score now filling the hall. Sam would have solved the problem in an instant. I place every recording device we’ve got in a circle around the conductor’s brogues and hope for the best.

“When my native place is bright with the glow of spring, I sow affection-permeated seeds with mother’s love… ” the woman sings, in an ethereal soprano. The strings surge in a melancholy crescendo, and the woman gracefully sweeps the air with her sleeve: “I earth the buds in autumn. I fertilise them with manure in the winter.” I look at Pei, surprised by the use of “manure” in such a romantic song—but he’s lost in the woman’s beautiful voice. I shelve it as another lost-in-translation moment and allow Pei’s music to transport me.

After another extraordinary verse, the woman closes the song with a single, ethereal note: “My native home, it’s the best place to beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. ” She raises her arms, gazing over our heads at her own private vision of Sydney Park. The conductor puts down his baton. The musicians lower their instruments. Everyone looks at Pei. He turns to me. “Bravo! Bravo!” I shout, clapping madly, not caring if this is not how North Koreans behave in such a formal setting. Not only were Pei’s lyrics more interesting than mine; his music was exquisite.

“Our Dear Leader said to make good music, the composer and director must be close friends, and drink together on a regular basis,” says Pei, following us out. “For this reason, I must hug you.” I oblige, surprised by this spontaneous show of affection. If the Japanese, as the cliché goes, are the “British of Asia,” the Koreans—both North and South—are the Italians: quick to anger, quick to please, and unashamedly passionate. Pei hugs me tight for a very long time. He smells of peppermint and whisky. “So warm. So genuine. I want a souvenir,” says Pei, and Nic takes our photo.

“I hope our actress can do your beautiful music justice,” I whisper in Pei’s ear—and he’s so delighted he insists on travelling with us to our next shoot.

All the way to the Tae kwon do Palace, Pei conducts a post-mortem on his song, agonising about whether I really liked it, or if I was just being polite. I tell him repeatedly that he’s written a masterpiece. So do Sun Hi, Nicola, Wang, and Q. It’s not enough. “Yes, but did she really like it?” he asks the driver, for the umpteenth time. The driver’s the only person still listening: the rest of Team Gas have given up. “I mean, she could just have meant she likes it in a professional sense, you know?” Pei frets. “Not a genuine, soulful one…”

The driver does what any self-respecting Australian would do when faced with such artistic wankery: he snaps. “She liked it, for fuck’s sake. Now, for the love of God, shut up!” We laugh, and Pei grins happily. It’s just what he needed to hear. Nic and I know exactly what the driver’s said, without the translation. Filmmaking’s like that. You can be working in an alien culture, but when the creative ego’s involved, we’re all as fragile as each other: identical needy lunatics.

We carry our gear into the cavernous stadium of the Tae kwon do Palace to discover forty-two black-belts in starched white uniforms lined up on a sprung stage. They do complex axe-kick patterns in perfect unison and chop wooden planks with knife-blade palms. They climb into a human pyramid, four people high—and a man does a string of backflips, somersaulting through the air towards a plank held by a woman balanced at the pyramid’s top, snapping it in half with his foot. As the athletes defy gravity with these spectacular feats, Kim Jong Il looks down from the gods, above a red slogan: Let us Practise Every Day and Become Iron-Fisted Masters, in Service of Our Beloved Generalissimo Kim Jong Il! These fighters are the best in North Korea, and would rake in medals by the truckload if they were allowed to compete overseas. But the International Olympic Committee only recognises the South Korean version of tae kwon do, and North Korean black-belts are banned from the games. Foreign camera crews like us are the closest these athletes get to displaying their skills to the West.

Mr. Chen, a ripped fifty-year-old who has been appointed to choreograph the stunts in my film, has a problem with a line in the script: “She grabs him by the arm, throws him onto her back and dumps him on the mat.” This has caused great consternation among his team—there is no tae kwon do throw to match the description. I explain, a little guiltily, that the sentence was written to fit into one line on the page rather than describe an actual move.

“No matter, here are three moves we prepared earlier,” Chen says and claps his hands. A man and woman line up on the stage to bow—then execute three fights of death-defying intensity. At the end of each one, the woman sends the man flying with a gutcrunching punch, literally walking sideways up his body at one point to wrap her leg round his neck and snap him to the ground.

“Matt and Pete need to make the fight in your movie look real,” Chen says solemnly, and claps his hands again. A broad-shouldered young man in camouflage pants, easily six foot five, bows at the nuggety Chen. They do a violent hand-to-hand combat sequence, which ends with Chen throwing his attacker through the air. The man slams on his back, then flips himself upright with a dazzling smile. It’s as brutal as anything I’ve seen in Hollywood—with none of the clever cutting that is used to make the violence look real. I can’t wait to show my actors what “doing your own stunts” means in North Korea.

We wrap the day on the twilit slopes of Moran Hill, a Pyongyang park famous for its group dancing. Most weekends, people come here to laze under landscaped trees over sizzling Korean barbeques. On national holidays, they dance. Q unwraps a picnic lunch of tempura and fried prawns on sticks, and Team Gas lie back in the grass, devouring the well-earned meal. I’m sure the group dancing on Moran Hill is a state-enforced activity: I’ve seen enough footage of Pyongyang’s supposedly happy punters, waltzing in perfectly choreographed circles, to know that the collective joy is manufactured.