Restricted,but not deterred

Three new films show,in different ways,that it is possible to subvert official channels and show North Korea for what it is: a real place with real problems....

Besides being a dictator,a political thorn for the West and a Dr Evil-like figure of pop culture ridicule,the North Korean leader Kim Jong-il is also a film buff. Other dictators have taken an interest in cinema as a propaganda toolStalin exploited Sergei Eisenstein and Hitler hired Leni Riefenstahlbut Kim has gone further. The Dear Leader,as he is called,is the author of the textbook-cum-manifesto On the Art of the Cinema. He has been known to function as a hands-on mogul in the state-run film industry,rewriting scripts and nurturing pet projects. In 1978while running the propaganda department under his father,Kim Il-sung,the countrys founding presidenthe even arranged the kidnapping of Shin Sang-ok,a South Korean director,whom he tasked with improving the quality of North Korean movies.

But while Kims cinephilic ardour is well established,the cinema of and about North Korea remains as murky as one would expect of a nation routinely described as a hermit kingdom and an information black hole. North Korean movies are produced for internal consumption. Films about North Korea by outsiders run into the predictable problem of access. Views of the country are largely limited to satellite images and footage of showpiece spectacles like the mass games,stadium-filling pageants of synchronised acrobatics.

Three new films,however,show in very different ways that it is possible to bypass or subvert official channels when dealing with North Korea. N.C. Heikins documentary Kimjongilia,now playing in New York,draws on refugee testimony,as recent nonfiction books have done. The Red Chapel,by the Danish journalist Mads Brugger,is a culture-clash comedy as well as an ambush documentary in the vein of Sacha Baron Cohen and the Yes Men. The Juche Idea,by American experimental filmmaker Jim Finn,uses the theories of Kim Jong-il to satirise the process of art making under both socialist and capitalist systems.

The starting point for Kimjongilia,named for the flower created for Kims 46th birthday,was Kang Chol-hwans memoir Aquariums of Pyongyang,one of the first accounts of life in a North Korean gulag. After hearing Kang speak at a conference,Heikin optioned his book,intending to make a drama. The project evolved into a documentary about the countrys human-rights abusesthe summary imprisonments and executions,the needless famine of the mid-90sthat Kang and others have brought to light.

The idea was to put a human face on it, Heikin said. She supplemented her interviews with dance sequences inspired by the movements of the female traffic controllers who are among the most visible symbols of North Koreas capital,Pyongyang. The city has no traffic lights. Heikin also spliced in excerpts from propaganda films that she ordered from an Internet retailer,setting the litany of recounted horrors against how North Korea portrayed itself, she said.

Like Heikin,Brugger wanted to depict North Korea as a real place with real problems,not an abstract nuclear threat. The best way to do so,he decided,would be to go there. He enlisted two Danish-Korean performers,Jacob Nossell and Simon Jul,to pose as a comedy duo,and sought permission to visit on a cultural exchange programme. Brugger and his accomplices were allowed to perform in Pyongyang and document their preparations,as long as their tapes were turned over nightly for screening.

The Red Chapel,which won the world-cinema documentary prize at Sundance in January,traffics in what Brugger calls role-play journalism. As he had expected,there were no opportunities for major exposé while in North Korea: the groups translator doubled as a minder. Theres no smoking gun,but everything is between the lines, he said,adding that the film functions as a study of how an authoritarian regime destroys human emotion and interaction.

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Brugger theorises that the North Koreans were exploiting their guests for propaganda purposes. There is no mistaking the public-relations value of Nossell and Jul,South Korean-born Danes,choosing the North for their homecoming. Brugger admitted that he was himself guilty of using Nossell,who suffers from spastic paralysis and uses a wheelchair,as a kind of test case. North Korea watchers have long suspected Pyongyang,which has no disabled people,of sending those residents into exile or worse. People would ask Jacob if he was drunk or sick because theyd never seen anyone with a handicap, Brugger said.

The Juche Idea co-opts the language of North Korean agitprop. As an independent filmmaker,Finn said,he was struck by the low-budget resourcefulness of the North Korean movies he found for sale on eBay and by the film theories of Kim Jong-il,which often relate to the national philosophy of juche,roughly translated as self-reliance. Steeped in the obsolete language of revolutionary art,Finns meticulous,deadpan mockumentaries often play like unearthed artefacts from an alternate universe. Partly inspired by the Shin Sang-ok kidnapping,The Juche Idea centres on Yoon played by Yoon Jun-lee,a South Korean artist who has been invited toor perhaps detained ata North Korean artists residence. When not performing her farm duties,she makes insect-based bio-art including what the credits term a Kim Jong-il flyface sculpture and strives to find the politically correct pitch for video pieces like The Dentures of Imperialism.

It is safe to assume that not one of these disparate views of North Korea will find a North Korean audience. Kimjongilia was warmly received last year at South Koreas largest film festival,in Pusan,Heikin said. The Red Chapel was shown at a South Korean-run festival adjacent to the demilitarised zone,and Brugger said the North Korean authorities were aware of the film. Finn invited North Koreas UN ambassador to a screening of The Juche Idea,but did not hear back.