Anna Broinowski - Aim High in Creation!: A One-of-a-Kind Journey inside North Koreas Propaganda Machine

Copyright 2015 by Anna Broinowski

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

First North American Edition 2016

First published by Penguin in Australia under the title The Director Is the Commander

Excerpts from DPRK foreign language publications, films and songs included with gratitude and thanks to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Broinowski, Anna.

Title: Aim high in creation!: a one-of-a-kind journey inside North Koreas propaganda machine / Anna Broinowski.

Other titles: Director is the commander

Description: First North American edition. | New York: Arcade Publishing, 2016. | Previous edition published under the title: Director is the commander (2015).

Identifiers: LCCN 2016021762 (print) | LCCN 2016035442 (ebook) | ISBN 978-1-62872-676-3 (hardcover: alk. paper) | ISBN 978-1-62872-677-0 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Motion picture industryKorea (North). | Aim high in creation! (Motion picture) | Broinowski, Anna.

Classification: LCC PN1993.5.K63 B76 2016 (print) | LCC PN1993.5.K63 (ebook) | DDC 791.43095193dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016021762

Cover design by Laura Klynstra

Cover photographs taken by Nicola Daley. Internal and author photographs taken by Nick Bonner, Nicola Daley, and Wendy McDougall, all from Aim High in Creation!, courtesy of Unicorn Films

Printed in the United States of America

For Ava

CONTENTS

PYONGYANG

September 6, 2012, 8 a.m.

I M LYING ON A KHAKI BED at the top of the Yangakkdo Hotel: home to almost every entrepreneur, hack, spy, missionary, NGO and other misfit lucky enough to have snared a visa to the most isolated nation on earth. Unless, of course, youre cross-dressing NBA star Dennis Rodman, in which case youre probably greeting the day in the lavish palace of North Koreas basketball-mad leader, Kim Jong Un.

The Yangakkdo thrusts above Pyongyang from an island in the Taedong River. At a distance its impressivean ominous monolith dwarfing the landscape, like Stanley Kubricks plinth in 2001: A Space Odyssey . Closer up, the cracked glass and corroded casing reveal that the skyscraper, like so much else in this mysterious place, is a barely functional facade. According to rumours Ive collected so far, the forty-six floors below my room are totally empty. Floor Five, which is accessible only via a hidden staircase, reportedly has banks of surveillance monitorstrained on every foreigner on my floor.

A narrow bridge connects us to the citys neat concrete sprawl. You may traverse it daily in a bus or car, chaperoned at all times by a North Korean minder. You may not cross it alone. I discovered this yesterday, when I set out for a stroll and was stopped by the bellboys. There was a choreography to their movements, a firmness behind their smiles, as they manoeuvred me into the revolving door with its plastic flower tubs and spun me back into the cavernous lobby.

I guess I could sneak down to the river and swim across. But the prospect of bellboys in wetsuits, crouching behind the Yangakkdos clipped bushes, ready to spring with ninja-like efficiency on anyone who tries such a thing, feels too real.

I focus on dozing off my jet lag. And scanning the ceiling for the glint of hidden cameras.

In exactly twelve minutes, I will receive a chirpy call from Ms. K, wondering why I am not at breakfast. Thats code for get in the elevator now: with the Yangakkdos creaking carcass plagued by power outages, the lift down can take up to eighteen minutes.

Yesterday, my unflappable British cinematographer Nicola Daley and I learnt its not a good idea to keep Ms. K waiting. We were twenty minutes late, wrangling our cameras, tripods, and battery-powered lights onto rusty trolleys and down to the idling van. Ms. K, in a Hawaiian shirt and hot-pink pants, maintained a frosty silence all the way to our first shoot at the Pyongyang Film Studio.

At the studio gates, the Kalashnikov-toting sentry glared at her watch, shot us a red-lipsticked scowl, and slid open the metal portcullis in insouciant slow-mo. Only once wed lugged our gear with head-bowed reverence past the Dear Leader Kim Jong Ils statue, and offered chocolates to the chain-smoking filmmakers waiting in the meeting room, did Ms. K relax and flash me her usual half-happy, half-rueful smile.

In a minute I will don the white shirt and slip that are to be my new, respectable front for todays interviewsalong with a thick layer of artful makeup. War paint is not my thing, but the North Koreans pride themselves on judging character through the face.

So far, the perky young interpreter Ms. K has chosen for us appears to be editing everything I say. I am not taking any more chances.

I am the only Western filmmaker ever granted total access to the North Korean film industry. I am determined to win the trust of the artists who have built one of the most successful propaganda machines on earthshaping the thoughts and dreams of an entire nation. I want to discover what motivates them, how they live, who inspires them, and what they know. It has taken me two years to get here. I have two weeks to find out.

I stretch and shuffle to the window. Forty-seven floors below, the iron barge that has punctuated my night with its toe-curling screech continues to scrape rocks, one by one, from the muddy river. Its a quaint soundtrack: the steampunk rattle of a nation stubbornly wedded to growth, despite its nineteenth-century technology. I wonder if the grey-pyjamaed men heaving rocks off the chute go ashore to sleep, or if they are chained to the barge around the clock. With up to two hundred thousand people labouring to their deaths in gulags that Ms. K will never permit me to mention, let alone film, anythings possible.

But the prison camps seem far, far away from the strangely beautiful city spread out before me, with its pastel buildings and lush green parks. The light bouncing up from the river is soft and clean, infusing my drab room with possibility. It silvers the carved arms of the brocade chairs; the peeling veneer of the bar-fridge; the boxy edge of the no-name TV; the wall calendar of Mount Paektu, birthplace of Kim Jong Il, recently deceased.

The Dear Leaders rosy face rises above Paektus snow-dusted crater, beaming his Technicolor smile. His permed head is haloed by a double rainbow and a star, in a glorious blood-of-the-workers sunset, Juche 100. Thats 2012 in my parallel but no longer accessible Western universe: a place which accepts that Kim Jong Il was actually born in a Siberian hut in 1942where his mother kept him rugged to his eyeballs in Vyatskoye mink for three frozen winters, while his father, Kim Il Sung, waged a bloody guerrilla war to wrest Korea back from the occupying Japanese.