North Korea is an extremely reclusive and hostile entity which tries to hide even the most banal facts about the daily life of its inhabitants from the outside world. Visitors are strictly monitored and prohibited from even stepping outside their hotel on their own, all media disseminate nothing but mind-numbing propaganda. Some of that mind-numbing propaganda consists of mind-numbing propaganda movies.
That was all I knew about the country when I started my journey into the strange world of North Korean cinema. Mind-numbing propaganda trash movies from the world’s most secretive country… I simply had to check them out!
In fact, you can learn a lot about North Korea by watching their movies closely. Soon, you will get behind the overt propaganda and see what those movies really try to tell the domestic audience. They sometimes introduce problems the North Korean state has to deal with and show how those problems should ideally be solved – but for an outsider like me, those movies only introduce the problems as major headaches to the NK government. Headaches like people leaving their villages for the cities (dealt with in stern fashion in the 1987 film A Bellflower), headaches like the children of the privileged being unwilling to sacrifice their youth in the labor campaigns of the Dear Leader (Myself in the Distant Future from 1997 can’t find a solution to this problem and opts for pure silliness – the rotten apple redeems himself by inventing a wood-gas tractor and feeding it with his shoes in the dramatic finale).
I got however far more involved with North Korean cinema than just watching the films in the theater or videos on the couch. I visited the Pyongyang-based Korea Film Export & Import Corporation, I had strange meetings with North Korean diplomats looking for unlikely movies in Berlin – probably for the viewing benefit of the Dear Leader, I went to Rome to interview the only Western director who ever shot a feature film in North Korea.
I’m very thankful to the DailyNK for allowing me to share my stories on these unlikely encounters with you in the upcoming weeks.
If you want to know more about my background in traveling the world researching truly bizarre films, read my book Trashfilm Roadshows (published by Headpress, Manchester, 2002) from which East of Siberia, the first story in the upcoming series was taken.
If you want to recommend the stories presented here to friends who prefer to read Korean, tell them that East of Siberia was published in translation in the book 발칙한 한국학 edited by Scott Burgeson and that Films for the Dear Leader? and Ten Zan – Ferdinando Baldi’s Ultimate Mission were printed in the book 더 발칙한 한국학, also edited by Scott Burgeson.
Johannes Schönherr 
