Aim High in Creation! by Anna Broinowski

Author:Anna Broinowski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2016-03-11T16:00:00+00:00

When we get back to the forty-seventh floor, Ms. K is waiting. She gives me an old DVD player and a stack of discs. She has scrawled the titles in black text: they are Mr. Pak’s and Mr. Ri’s latest movies, plus some classics starring Yurim and Ms. Yun. At least five have been made in the last three years. I thank Ms. K profusely. This is pay dirt: I have in my hands twenty-two films that no one, not even Johannes and his underground cinema friends, has seen outside North Korea.

Lizzette and I shower and throw on the Yangakkdo’s thin terry-towelling robes. I dose up on Imodium and hook the DVD player to my boxy TV. We climb into the narrow beds for a slumber party, Pyongyang style: no room service, no bar fridge, and no sleep. Ms. K has not said if we can take the films with us when we leave, which means that if we want to know what North Korean filmmakers have been doing for the last decade, we have to watch everything at Chollima speed—tonight.

I slide in the first disc, a 2009 movie by Mr. Ri called Two Families of Hangdong. I’ve pegged the tough-looking Ri, with his crumpled combat gear and permanent fag, as an action man. But I’m wrong. Two Families is a witty satire about married life: the North Korean Husbands and Wives. It follows two women living in the same Pyongyang apartment block. One has a successful husband, happy kids, and a sparkling flat. The other is a poor but beautiful singer, struggling to raise her son in the absence of her deadbeat husband. When he does come home, they fight—and the whole apartment block joins in, advising them how to fix their marriage in group-criticism sessions run by the block’s bossy chairwoman.

Gradually, the wives’ fates shift: the happy wife’s husband fancies the singer and starts to neglect his work. Meanwhile, the deadbeat husband reveals he’s been working on a top-secret project to help North Korea cut its dependency on foreign oil. He unveils his invention and becomes a national hero, praised by Kim Jong Il himself. The singer realises she’s been wrong about her husband and embraces him in their newly furnished flat. Next door, the once-happy wife has driven her husband to drink, thanks to her relentless nagging to keep up with the Joneses. The message is clear: he who sacrifices personal happiness for the good of the nation will be rewarded; he who pursues his own selfish ambitions is doomed. But Two Families is not heavy-handed; it is lightly acted, simply shot, and surprisingly funny.

One down, twenty-one to go. So far, so good. This is no more gruelling than watching back-to-back episodes of Seinfeld—and a lot more novel. I pick up The Country I Saw, by the white-haired Pak. It’s a box set: part two was made this year, part one twenty years ago. The prequel stars a humble Japanese professor who teaches North Korean politics in Tokyo.

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