Erstellt am: 7. 5. 2016 - 13:00 Uhr

How to aim high in creation

Australian film-maker, Anna Brionowsky, talks about her extraordinary collaboration with North Korea.

Hilarious, intriguing and surreal is the description given to the film "Aim High in Creation", directed by Australian film maker, Anna Broinowski.

In it, in an attempt to put a stop to planned fracking near her Sydney home, Broinowski travelled to North Korea to seek the advice of the masters of propaganda film making. The result is a mixture of drama and documentary which goes under the skin of North Korea, and of the master propagandist himself, the "Dear Leader" Kim Jong Il.

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Anna Broinowsky on location in Pyongyang

Anna explained to Riem Higazi how this unlikely project came about:

AB: A dear friend had been to Pyongyang for a short trip to investigate human rights abuses in North Korea, and she came back with a kind of joke present for me, which was Kim Jong Il’s, the deceased dictator’s, manifesto on how to make the perfect propaganda movie called "The Cinema and Directing". I thought it was a bit of a joke, but when I started to read it I was immediately hooked, because it was immediately clear that 1) Kim Jong Il loved western movies and 2) he was a master propagandist. I became very quickly obsessed with how he had used movies to persuade 24 million people that the Kims were close to gods.

RH: Did you get the impression that Kim Jong Il was just a frustrated film maker?

AB: Because he was so passionate about the arts and movies, and he grew up watching western movies, and he scripted them, and he worked as a kind of director behind the scenes on many of the North Korean movie blockbusters, I used to think he was a frustrated artist who got the wrong job. But, in fact, that’s not true. Kim Jong Il was very cunning, he was the effeminate son. He wasn’t seen as the natural heir to Kim Il Sung and he proved to his dad that he was the right guy for the job by, when he was the head of the propaganda industry, revolutionizing North Korean movies. They went from being dour, Soviet style epics about the greatness of socialism into being basically worship-fests of Kim Il Sung. And when Kim Il Sung saw what his son was capable of, he thought, "Yeah, OK, you can take over."

RH: His book also gave you an idea for a film against fracking.

AB: Yeah. I mean I had kind of managed to distil the ten basic rules, if you like, that apply to all North Korean propaganda films, and one of the main rules was that you must always have an enemy, and that enemy, preferably, is either an evil imperialist, or the invading Yankee bastards. That seems to be the case in all of their films. So I thought, OK, I'm going to have a film within a film, where a bunch of very sophisticated, well regarded, Sydney actors and crew follow Kim Jon Il's ham-fisted propaganda movies in Sydney, and made a propaganda film there. And, of course, looking round for my enemy, the most obvious example I could see of unfettered capitalist greed was this fracking, or coal seam gas mine, that was planned for a park next to me house. So that's how that started.

And this is the final result:

In this Reality Check Saturday Special, Anna Broinowsky goes under the skin of the North Korean film industry.

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