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Johannes Schoenherr
A native of Leipzig, East Germany, Schoenherr started out as gravedigger before finding his way to the other side of the Berlin Wall in 1983. Having arrived in the West, he joined the anarchist Kino im KOMM cinema collective in Nuremberg, and it wasn't long before he got involved in setting up American underground shows. He subsequently arranged European tours for some of the transgressive masters and ended up living on the Lower East Side himself soon after that, enrolled at New York University. He received an MA in Cinema Studies in 1994.
From there, Schoenherr expanded his interests to Asia and toured American underground shorts through Japan in 1997, then took Japanese punk & cult movies on a tour of Europe in 1998. He even went as far as going to North Korea to explore their films in 1999, before screening bizarre North Korean propaganda epics at festivals and theaters in Europe in 2000.
He wrote about his strange movie exhibition travels in the book Trashfilm Roadshows (Headpress, 2002), and published a history of North Korean Cinema in Film Out of Bounds (Matthew Edwards (ed.), McFarland, 2007).
He is currently living in Japan as freelance writer on travel, film and food.
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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.. |
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Bizarre movies have always held a strong fascination for me, so too the places where such movies come from. Having spent years living in the bowels of the Lower East Side and arranging screenings for the rabid assaults of the New York Cinema of Transgression, an.. |
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Come September 4, 1999, I was seated on an Air Koryo plane, having travelled from Beijing and now touching down on the landing strip of Pyongyang Airport. My initial glimpse from the air had confirmed what I’d already heard about the scarcity and poverty of North K.. |
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Miss Choe met us at our rooms and led us to the hotel restaurant. “Sorry, it’s not open yet,” she apologized, and seated herself next to Mr. Sok at the entrance. I was looking for some topic of conversation, and remembered what a Japanese film critic had once tol.. |
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First things first, however. The morning was set aside for the one official function every visitor to North Korea must respect: placing flowers in front of the statue of Kim Il-sung at the top of Mansudae Hill, a structure as high as a skyscraper that overlooked.. |
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My misgivings at not being allowed to move around without a guide were easing off. I looked at it stoically: outwardly comply to all that is asked of you while, in reality, secretly do whatever you want anyway. It was the same as in any dictatorship. I had a lot o.. |
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The less-than-exciting road trip back to Pyongyang was again made pleasant with conversation and laughter. Miss Choe accompanied me to the hotel restaurant, where Nicolas was already seated at a table. She left to talk to some other people, while I immediately la.. |
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In the morning, as was customary, we had a meeting with Mr. Paek, Mr. Sok and our guides at the Korea Film Export and Import offices- conversations about nothing in particular over cups of instant coffee. Today started out no differently, until Mr. Sok suddenl.. |
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That evening at the hotel restaurant, Mr. Kim arrived to collect Nicolas. “Ah,” I said, getting up from the dinner table, “the video show starts.”“No,” Mr. Kim said politely. “Mr. Sok wants to meet only with Mr. Nicolas. Maybe you can see the video another ti.. |
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It was the DPRK’s founding day and a national holiday- but no break for us. We had to continue watching movies all day long, in the spirit of the “Shock Brigades” who knew no holidays either. We had seen plenty of Shock Brigades in the movies and occasionally on.. |
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