Kim Jong Film

With the death of Kim Jong Il,  the media are dredging up all the legends and lore that comprise what they think they know about the secretive North Korean leader who inherited that brutal dictatorship from his father and seems to have passed it on to Kim Jung On, a twenty-something son with a James Bond fixation.  The Telegraph leads the way with its Kim compendium.

Heaven on Earth? Deceased Son Kim Jong Il, Father Kim Il Sung, and Adoring Korean Children - from the 2009 documentary Kimjongilia

Like plenty of autocrats, Kim is said to have been a film fan. (So was Enver Hoxha of Albania.) The smart dictators know that you don’t just burnish your own aura of power with tanks (although Kim did that), or by starving most of your population into submission (although Kim did that, too) or by scheming your way into the production of nuclear weapons (Kim also accomplished that film-worthy task).

Even in North Korea, the population is reached through mass media/entertainment – there is a limit to the number of citizens who can be forced into a sports stadium to applaud on cue. And Kim was smart enough to know that North  Korean cinema wasn’t up to the job, so he had South Korean film directors kidnapped and conscripted to make better North Korean movies. Here’s the BBC outline of that gambit.

Now that Kim is dead, and Kim III has his hands on the Pyongyang treasury, there will no doubt be a budget for a Kim Jong Il epic. What’s there to say about a pudgy spoiled son of a strong man, who dyed his hair and murdered his people?  Plenty, if you can force the people to say it. My guess is that he’ll be portrayed as a patriot who worked tirelessly for his people (overwork is what killed him on his personal train, the official story goes),  maybe even including the fact (in this mission of fantasy) that he brought nuclear weapons to the besieged DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea).

If there were any justice, a hard term to use when talking about North Korea, Kim Jung Il might be the subject of a martial arts or yakuza comedy (The Not So Great Dictator), with a great Asian talent like Jackie Chan in the lead. Not likely, though, even though Kim Jung On is said to be a Jackie Chan fan.

While we wait to see how celluloid memorializes Kim for eternity, there have been plenty of documentaries about North Korea, enough to warrant their own entry in Wikipedia. They don’t tend toward comedy.  Sadly, North Korea was more than a punch-line.

My favorite is Yodok Stories by the Polish filmmaker Andzej Fidyk, who made his film in South Korea when denied permission to shoot in North Korea. His glimpse into the horror of life in a country where there are some 200,000 prisoners in concentration camps came from escapees who found their way to South Korea. They speak of their ordeal in the land of the Juche Theory as they rehearse a musical (I’m not kidding) about Yodok, a place of appalling suffering, also called Camp 15. There are no images of the camp, only testimony of time spent there and scenes of readjustment in Seoul – including moments where prisoners encounter once-vicious guards who also escaped. Joking about Kim and his crowd won’t be easy after you sit through this shocking and imaginative doc, which played at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) in 2008.

Yodok Stories - Tales of Horror from the Rare Prisoners Who Survived a Notorious North Korean Concentration Camp

West-wary North Korea had its real Manchurian Candidates, one of whom is the subject of Crossing the Line (2006), a Virginia-born defector who changed sides while stationed in Korea n 1962, and has been in Pyongyang ever since. “I have never regretted coming to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” he declares. And why not? James Joseph “Joe” Dresnok taught some English (in a slight southern accent), and he starred as a Western Imperialist in bad DPRK movies and television shows. He lives the life of a privileged guest and spends his days fishing and smoking – an envied level of luxury in his adopted country.

Crossing the Line -- the Real Manchurian Candidate, Joe Dresnok

Beyond the portrait of Dresnok, who looks and talks like a hypnotized thug, there is his chilling tale of an elaborate North Korean kidnapping campaign that makes you worry that the Pyongyang folks have their finger on a nuclear trigger.   The North Koreans forced  kidnapped westerners to breed, with the intention of creating a force of western-looking agents who could be sent abroad in the service of Kim Il Sung, father of the recently deceased leader. It didn’t work, no surprise.  WE also meet James Dresnok, Joe’s privileged son, who barely speaks English, but plans a career as a diplomat. Stranger things have happened in North Korea.

Back to the punch-lines. In The Red Chapel, the Danish TV satirist Mads Brugger tells the story of two Korean-born adoptees who grew up in Denmark and became comedians – one is in a wheelchair. They journey to North Korea, where they will put on a theater performance. It’s all a joke, except none of the North Koreans are in on it, even as they shadow their guests day and night. The Red Chapel makes South Park’s jabs at Kim as style guru in Team America seem tame.

The Red Chapel - Two Danish Comedians, and Their Vehicle

As always, context is crucial. As you’re laughing, the Danish entertainers pass through a place of institutionalized horror.  It’s one thing to make jokes about North Korea at a safe distance. It’s another to make them right under Kim’s nose.

Mads Brugger is back. The Ambassador, his new satirical documentary, features Brugger himself as a scammer who buys a Liberian ambassadorship in the Central African Republic as he opens a match factory staffed by pygmies as a front for a diamond business. Once again, he and his crew are the only ones who know it’s a joke. The Ambassador was the opening film at the IDFA (see my review), and it will be in the World Documentary Competition at Sundance 2012.

Also at Sundance in 2009 was Kimjongilia, a doc named for a begonia developed in 1988, in honor of Kim Jong Il’s birthday. The film shows lavish stadium performances in honor of the now-deceased leader.

Tags: Andrzej Fidyk, Crossing the Line, Denmark, DPrK, film, IDFA, Jackie Chan, Joe Dresnok, Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il, Kim Jung Il, Mads Brugger, Manchurian Candidate, North Korea, punch-line, Pyongyang, Red Chapel, South Korea, Sundance, Telegraph, The Ambassador, Yodok Storis