We dined in the main assembly hall. The minister for culture gave a short speech, after which we headed over to the tables and our fixed seating arrangement. Alice from the Werkstattkino, Miss Choe, Mr. Sok and three officials sat at my large round table – much too large for us to talk comfortably to one another. One of the officials introduced himself as the mastermind behind today’s festivities at the cinema hall. His two associates remained silent throughout the evening, which relegated the difficult conversation at the table to just small talk among the guests and their guides.
I could see Kay debating excitedly with an old official at the next table. They were arguing over the details of Mao suits, with Kay trying to get hold of the address of the official party tailor.
The food was disappointing. Much worse than the food we had tasted the previous year in far humbler restaurants, and no match for Korean restaurants in South Korea, Japan, or even Berlin. Not enough spices – Korean food of course needing a lot of spices.
Was the fact that even ministers had to do without spices a sign of the economy declining yet further? Upon returning to Japan after my previous Pyongyang trip, I had been full of praise for North Korean cuisine. But this time…?
The cold noodles however – always served at the end of a meal – finally arrived, and they were exceptional. The South Korean journalists had been right: whenever they wrote about the summit meeting between their president and Kim Jong-il, there was always space enough to praise Pyongyang cold noodles.
Dinner was almost through. Miss Pak came over and whispered something to Miss Choe. Somehow, I guessed what it was bout. Sure enough, Miss Choe asked me immediately afterwards what I had been doing at the train station. “You went there twice,” she said.
“:Just going out for a walk,” I replied. “Nothing special.”
“You know the rules here,” she reprimanded. “No walking around without your guide. Ask me when you want to go somewhere – and please tell that to your delegates.”
Oh, yeah. I was the head of the German delegation…
Back at the hotel, I asked the Finns if they had received ay new instructions from their guide. They hadn’t. Their guide spoke hardly any English and didn’t really seem to care much about what they did. It came as no surprise to discover soon after that the Finns would be getting a replacement guide.
Every delegation had one or two guides, depending on its size. Nicolas had a guide all to himself, a young man named Mr. Kim, just like his guide from last time. (That Mr. Kim was now in Beijing, helping coordinate the festival from there.) Nicolas would buy him drinks constantly to keep him drunk, but it didn’t help much – Mr. Kim was an ardent little watchdog, leaving Nicolas no room to do much on his own at all. Mr. Sok, however, seemed to have forgotten all about the trouble he had had with Nicolas the previous year. He was constantly talking to Nicolas about “making money” and signing a new contract similar to the one last year – which had, of course, come to nothing.
The film festival finally got underway. The first morning, Myself in Distant Future had been chosen for us, to be screened away from the regular crowds in a small room at the cinema hall. I had shown that film in Europe and seen it at least thirty times. I knew the dialogue by heart and could even recite it. I was allowed to skip the screening.
I went to the film market on the second floor of the cinema hall – except there was no marketing taking place. There were only a couple of posters on the walls, several empty chairs and a few vacant video booths. If one was prepared to go through a mass of red tape it was possible to sample some North Korean videos. But no foreign delegations were bothering trying to sell their films in return. Who would they have sold them to, anyway? I was glad to discover the Fins loitering around – at least I wasn’t the only one attending the “film market.”
For the rest of the day, the entire German delegation were forced to watch the official “market programme,” which consisted of tedious North Korean garbage that I would never have included in my own film series.
At least Mr. Paek could sympathise, and offered to let us watch films- of any type we might actually want to see – over at the export company’s office. Nevertheless, I had my own special request: I wanted to see a film, any film, inside the Taedongmun cinema. Having seen pictures of it and driven by it several times the previous year – when it was “unfortunately not possible” to go inside – I had wanted to visit the attractive little fifties’ style film house with its faux Greek columns out front. This time my wish was granted.
The Taedongmun cinema was the first stop for the German delegation the following morning. A very nice little cinema indeed, although much bigger inside than the façade outside indicated. It was packed with locals – no foreigners around except for us, nor any delegations from factory or farm collectives. Just regular people, most wearing a uniform of some sort or another, as was the case in the streets.
Crash Landing was playing, a Chinese action film and quite a rarity for audiences here. North Korean cinemas don’t show foreign productions outside the festival at all – thus Pyongyangites only had the opportunity to see foreign films once every two years. Outside of that, the only other foreign picture – mostly old and of Eastern European origin – came via a weekly slot on TV, accompanied by the once-a-week only broadcast of international news.
There were, however, some more well-to-do North Koreans we spoke with who had seen all the recent American blockbusters, courtesy of a large black market for bootlegs imported from China.
Crash Landing was shown with Korean voice-overs. Miss Pak translated to the two delegates sitting to her immediate left, of which I wasn’t one – though that didn’t hinder my understanding of what was happening in the film: an airplane is unable to drop its landing gear, the only alternative being to slide the craft down the runaway and hope that the whole thing doesn’t explode into a ball of flame. We see the crew taking all the necessary precautions, the ground staff preparing for the worst, and some passengers going nuts. Of course, the plane makes it down safely in the end.
The reaction of the audience was that of any other action film audience. Though, for me, leaving the theatre was far more like wandering into a weird movie than actually being in the cinema for nearly two hours. To see the inside of an Air China plane on the screen was nothing special; North Korean reality, however, after the lights came up, comprised of people passing by the theatre clutching huge flagpoles, children marching behind them, and soldiers everywhere. The whole city focused on the one collective task: preparing for the all-important Party anniversary.
More films at the export company offices. First up was The Laudable Daughter of Korea, a documentary about Jong Song-ok, the marathon girl of last year. We saw the award-winning run, her reception in Pyongyang, and the Mercedes and house she received from Kim Jong-il as a ‘thank you’ – though the Great Leader didn’t actually bother to meet her in person. We also saw Nicolas and myself, standing in the midst of a cheering crowd, and described by the narrator as a foreign TV crew. Ha! Breaking the rules, running away from our guides and still winding up as propaganda fodder! We should run away a lot more often, seeing as such behaviour was condoned by state propaganda!
I had always wanted to see the place from whence these films came – the Korean Film Studios. In fact, North Korea has several film studios, among them the April 25 Film Studio of the Korean Peoples’ Army” and the “April 26 Children’s Film Studio”. But the Korean Film Studio was the biggest and most important. It was the true home of North Korean film, having been founded in 1947, and seeing production of the first North Korean film – My Home Village – in 1949. Last year I had inquired about a visit but was told, not unexpectedly, that such a thing was “unfortunately not possible.”
