6 FILM

Seeing and believing

he guide charged with second world war, on the site of a and offered plenty of “on-the-spot A tour of the showing visitors around the small sock factory 16 kilometres guidance”, a key feature of his largest film Korean Film Studio has the north of the capital. legacy. Much is made of Kim Jong- chiselled good looks of Taking heed from the Russian il’s love of films, but it should be The 55-days theory Tsomeone made for the big screen. example, the impact and use of remembered that this was also his studio in North His face remains deadpan as he propaganda was understood early in job: in 1970 he was appointed [and] other advice watches 20 foreigners emerge from and, despite a limited deputy director in charge of culture Korea gives the tour bus, all looking a little budget, the studios succeeded in and arts in the Propaganda and on filmmaking bedraggled at the end of the day. rolling out a number of feature films Guidance Department by his father, is laid out in Kate Whitehead He leads our Koryo Tours group early on, the first of which was My Kim Il-sung. across the vast entrance to the Home Village in 1949. The film industry’s heyday came Kim Jong- some insights obligatory statue of Kim Il-sung. A drama about a North Korean in the two decades that followed, This one shows the man the North who escapes from a Japanese- through the 1970s and 1980s, when il’s book into the Koreans call the Great Leader with a administered prison and becomes some of the country’s best-loved group of filmmakers, an old-style an underground operative for the movies were made. propaganda camera projector to his left, his arm Korean People’s Revolutionary Among them were The Flower resting on a young girl’s shoulders. Army, “the film touched the Girl (1972), a film version of one machine The group is directed to form a liberated Korean people to the of North Korea’s “Five Great line in front of the statue – hearts, for it contains the content Revolutionary Operas”, and Unsung something we’re getting better at that because there is the Great Heroes, a more than 20-hour film four days into the week-long tour of Leader Comrade Kim Il-sung, there series made between 1978 and 1981, : we bow in unison and is the fatherland and native place whose cast included American one in the party lays a bouquet of for our people and a bright future defectors James Joseph Dresnok and flowers at the foot of the statue. is promised”, according to studio Charles Robert Jenkins. Standard protocol for visiting any literature. Today the Korean Film Studio, state-run enterprise completed, the The film industry got a real boost designated for feature film tour can begin. under the country’s second leader, production, is still active, but its The studio was built in 1947, in Kim Jong-il. He visited the Korean output is down to about 20 films a the immediate aftermath of the Film Studio more than 600 times year – and some suggest it’s even