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

That’s just the backdrop. In the arena itself, which is the size of a small Pacific atoll, a thousand more children join soldiers, gymnasts, comedians, dancers, acrobats, and opera singers in exquisite unison, creating spectacular patterns with their bodies. “My love has blossomed in the bosom of my comrades,” they sing, as human hyacinths bloom and wither across the shifting sands of the stadium and shimmering waves of blue-clad girls break against a pixelated sunset. The show moves from high kitsch to pathos as the performers recreate the cherished Korean folk story of two young lovers separated by an imperialist oppressor. As the lovers call to each other across a red silk sea, aerialists dressed as nuclear rockets fly through the air, shot from a cannon suspended in the roof.

Arirang is an extravagant metaphor for the divided Korea, a dazzling two-hour dream in which a Juche-inspired revolution makes the two Koreas one. The show ends with Kim Jong Il appearing on the rake in a halo, as the lovers reunite and two thousand marching girls in patent leather boots wave their swords in triumph.

Team Gas, Nic, and I spill into the night, surrounded by exuberant crowds. There are no food stalls or coffee vans outside the stadium—just a few flimsy tables selling hand-painted posters of the show. As we move through the chattering throng towards the van, the child performers surge from the stadium, their faces flushed with pride. Ms. K was not lying: they really do love it. Hundreds more of the cast pour out in a tsunami of sequins, plunging us inside a fantastic parade. It’s camp and macabre, a G-rated Mardi Gras: mums in chicken suits and dads dressed as rabbits mingle with unicycling clowns, while bloodied soldiers walk along with girls in gossamer gowns, their vampy makeup doing nothing to hide their innocence. Even the defiant marching girls seem fragile and shy close up. Do they know what they’re missing out on? Are they just pretending to be happy because they’re scared? I turn off my Western thought track. I already know the answer. These people, tonight at least, are genuinely happy. It’s a bliss born of togetherness—and ignorance.

Someone bumps my shoulder, and I turn to see a young man, his khaki shirt hanging loose, his eyes masked by black wraparounds. He does not belong in this picture. He has the arrogance of a punk, the edge of a rebel, the swagger of youth. He wears a cynical, fuck you expression, as if he already owns the future. He’s the first North Korean I’ve seen who looks like he knows—beyond any shadow of doubt—that his country is a confection of lies. The man melts into the crowd, and I climb into the van. I think of Jiro Ishimaru, the brave Japanese journalist who for years has worked with a defector to smuggle in USB sticks of South Korean TV shows and Western films to show North Koreans what life is really like on the other side of their propaganda wall. If the man who just bumped into me is anything to go by, it’s working.

Team Gas chat contentedly in the back, and I watch the euphoric faces glide past in a blur. I hope that these resilient, painfully isolated people will never have to be bombed. I hope that when their bubble is shattered, as it surely will be, it will be shattered by knowledge and not by war. I hope, most of all, that in freedom’s name, or in Juche’s name, or in any other name, their blood will never have to be shed.

The present, 8 p.m.

ON SEPTEMBER 14, 2012, NICOLA AND I left Pyongyang without a fuss. Ms. K returned our passports without explanation, and the customs guards stopped us photographing soldiers in the airport but left our footage alone.

Q, Ms. K, and Sun Hi stood on the other side of the barrier, waving us through. We’d slipped Sun Hi the Kate and Wills wedding stamp inside a box of Clinique and given Q a USB stick taped to a bottle of scotch. The stick contained pictures of Nic and me with our North Korean friends throughout the shoot. It also had my contact details in Sydney. Q promised to share it with the filmmakers—especially Mr. Pak. Ms. K graciously accepted a pink Japanese credit card holder, and the driver gleefully sequestered my Kim Kardashian perfume along with some Mild Seven cigarettes. All woefully inadequate compared with what Team Gas had given us, but it had to do.

I buckled myself into my Air Koryo seat, and the hostess welcomed me back. As the Ilyushin’s wheels kissed Kim Jong Il’s socialist paradise goodbye, I held my camera to the window, ready to catch the farmers who had tossed flowers at us the first time we flew in. The women were still there in the rice paddy, their skirts bunched around their waists. But this time, strangely—or not strangely at all, depending on how you view it—they didn’t look up. They just kept pulling reeds from the mud, their heads resolutely bowed.

On the plane from Beijing, I watched an exquisitely violent South Korean movie, the kind Hollywood directors now study for new ideas. It told the story of identical twin brothers who work in a circus: one good, one bad. Abandoned by their mother at birth, the evil brother murders young girls to dull his pain; the good brother, loyal but guilt-ridden, covers his twin’s bloody tracks. The film ends in an empty circus tent with the brothers beating each other to the death. After the saccharine fantasy of Arirang, it was easy to see this film as the South Koreans’ more cynical response to the tragedy of their divided world.

My documentary, Aim High in Creation!, premiered at the Melbourne International Film Festival in late 2013, causing delight and consternation. I wasn’t surprised—the combination of Kim Jong Il and coal seam gas was always going to be a stretch. Audiences in Paris, Seoul, Amsterdam, Romania, Myanmar, St Petersburg, Doha, and New York enjoyed the humour and camaraderie of our North Korean friends—but Sydney CSG activists were troubled by its linking of their cause to a totalitarian regime; the ABC felt its depiction of North Korea was “naive” and buried it in a late-night time slot; and Ms. K, I later discovered through Nick Bonner, was unhappy about the way my actors had carried a banner of Kim Jong Il on Bondi Beach.

A-list film festivals like Sundance, which had embraced Mads Brüggers’ anti–North Korean diatribe Red Chapel , unanimously rejected Aim High . Perhaps, as a middle-aged mother, my appearance in it as a gonzo-style frontman was too bizarre—or perhaps my sympathetic view of the North Korean filmmakers contradicted the mainstream horror story too radically. Conservative pundits who hadn’t bothered to watch the film slammed me for using “taxpayer dollars” to be an apologist for the regime, and journalists who had seen it variously labeled it intriguing, hilarious, excellent, surreal, and dotty.

The Australian government refused to give Mr. Pak a visa to attend the Melbourne premiere; instead, Nick had to take a copy into Pyongyang. The North Korean filmmakers were allowed to watch my short drama The Gardener , but not the documentary it sat inside. I’m relieved to report that after staring at Nick’s laptop in silence for some time, Pak and his colleagues gave my little film the thumbs-up. If you’d like to make up your own mind, Aim High in Creation! can be viewed on Netflix and DVD. If you’ve really drunk the Kool-Aid, you may want to make a North Korean propaganda film of your own—in which case, aimhighincreation.comis a great place to start.

I’ve written this book to share all the things I discovered about North Korea and its filmmakers that, for reasons either artistic or political, I had to leave out of my film. The hermit kingdom has changed since we shot there: contrary to initial hopes that the country would become more permissive under Kim Jong Un, North Korea has continued to test its missiles, execute its dissenters, and threaten the West at every opportunity.