Two Documentaries About North Korea That You Should See
Welcome to North Korea (2001)
This documentary is now nearly a decade old. The narrator paints a menacing image of North Korea, focusing on the former Great Leader, Kim Il Song. A large portion of the film shows a female tour guide showing foreigners around various cultural monuments.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJ6E3cShcVU&w=575&h=385]
We are taken through the Kim Il Song Memorial, in which his private train and personal Mercedes is displayed. A former North Korean journalist (or “propagandist,” as he is also referred to) is interviewed. He escaped to the South by “swimming the river.” He says of his former country, “Everyone is scared. Permanently.”
Skip to jarring footage of the public mourning Kim Il Song’s death; a sea of people, crying and shaking and falling to the ground in visible misery. A grown man in a suit is shown violently sobbing, yelling phrases such as, “Now he is dead! How can I hide my sorrow? My heart is ripped apart! Why? Why?”
Then to the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War museum. “Americans pulled their legs apart with chains,” the tour guide says, pointing to a picture of distraught Korean women. I visualize two human legs being mechanically pulled in opposite directions until they break apart. It sounds horrible. I wonder, “Shit, did we really do that?”
Then the foreigners are brought to the mountains outside Pyongyang, to the Internship Friendship Exhibition. Though their cameras were not permitted inside, it was said the palace showcases gifts from “befriended countries” around the world. The most notorious of these gifts is a basketball signed by Michael Jordan, and Joseph Stalin’s bulletproof limousine.
The film ends with children practicing for the Mass Games, or as the narrator calls it, the Mass Manifestation. He leaves us with the sentence, “They keep performing for visitors who never visit.”