Johannes Schönherr dropped me a line the other day to highlight an interview he conducted with Masao Kobayashi, the producer of Somi – the Taekwon-do Woman.
Always good to hear from the man as he highlights another little insight into making movies in the DPRK. You might remember us speaking previously about a potential screening of the DPRK-Japan co-production in London in an earlier post. If you are interested in seeing the film, please contribute!
A little down the line I hope to have a review of Johannes Schönherr’s book on North Korea cinema which has now officially been released. Grab your copy here.
Koryo Tours gets a lot of mentions here on the site. And with good reason. Nick Bonner and the guys run a slick outfit offering tours to North Korea, but most meaningfully for me they have had a hand in some of the best documentaries about North Korea as well bringing attention to the DPRK’s own cinematic output.
I’ve knew Nick Bonner during my time in Beijing and had long heard of his dream of filming a rom-com in North Korea with an entirely North Korean cast. So I was especially pleased when a long-time follower of the site forwarded me this New York Times article about the imminent release of the film Comrade Kim Goes Flying.
The film is due to get a premier at the Pyongyang International Film Festival and we’ll keep an eye out for it turning up on DVD, too.
As was pointed out to me on twitter, these guys are actually searching for money to make this screening happen! If you want to see it, contribute!
Well it’s not often I get to highlight screenings of North Korean films here on the site and it’s even more rare that I get to do it in the city I live in:
Regular readers will remember this is one of the films that DPRK film expert Johannes Schönherr mentioned in his interview back on the site a few weeks ago.
If you’re in London do not miss the opportunity to see this Japanese-DPRK co-production. More can be read about the project of bringing the film to the UK on the Crowd Funder page.
In the previous post we pointed out that Disney made it’s stage debut in the DPRK, but also in the same performance the theme from Sylvester Stallone’s “Rocky” was heard.
This above image and clip is from North Korean TV where some conspicuous Disney characters made an appearance. Here’s the story from AP:
Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh took the stage in North Korea during a concert for new leader Kim Jong Un in an unusual performance featuring Disney characters.
Performers dressed as some of America’s most memorable cartoon characters danced and pranced as footage from “Snow White,” “Dumbo,” “Beauty and the Beast” and other popular Disney movies played on a massive backdrop, according to still photos shown on state TV on Saturday.
Even a cursory google around the internet on the subject of North Korean cinema will lead you, quite rightly, in the direction of Johannes Schönherr.
My first introduction to Schönherr came when I discovered that his memoir “Trashfilm Roadshow” contained within it a chapter on his experiences travelling to North Korea in search in search of weird and wacky movies to fit in with the obscure titles he’d been touring around the world.
His delightfully boozy adventures take him from his native Germany to the US, North Korea and, finally, to Japan where he now resides and the whole book is definitely worth a read to discover how those films “from the outside” can be cherished in some many different situations and settings.
Having written a number of articles on North Korean cinema, I was pleased to see Johannes pop up on the comments section of this site. After exchanging a few emails (and a few rare North Korean DVDs) I decided it would be the perfect time to interview him for the site. This year will see the release of his opus “North Korean Cinema” which will finally provide the world with an English-language history of the cinema of the DPRK. I, for one, cannot wait for the book to be released. Below is the interview I conducted recently via email.
DPRK Films: Can you explain briefly how you became interested in North Korean cinema?
JS: Will try to do it as briefly as possible but still, it’s a longer story. I’ve always been interested in strange, far-out films. In films, that don’t usually run in the neighborhood theater. Back in the 1980s, I joined an anarchist cinema collective in Nuremberg, where I was living at the time. There, I learned everything about running a theater… and I could book all the weird movies into the program that I had read about but hadn’t been able to see.
That was the video age but I always wanted to see films on the big screen, projected from celluloid in front of an audience.
I was very much into American underground movies at the time, the films by Richard Kern or the Kuchar brothers. I got into contact with some of those underground film directors and arranged European tours for them.
But after a while, arranging tours for other people wasn’t that satisfying anymore. I wanted to go on the road with movies myself… and explore new territories. Like Japan for example. My then Japanese girlfriend arranged a tour of me doing shows with a program of American underground shorts in 1997… and I loved it.
At the same time, the Film House in Copenhagen asked me to program a sort of travelling festival of Japanese cyberpunk and to tour it through Europe. I did that and it went well.
So, after American punk porn and Japanese cyberpunk, where do you go next? It was 1998 and North Korea was all over the news for shooting a rocket over Japan. I had read somewhere that they make movies in North Korea and I thought, ‘Now, checking those ones out would be a trip’.
By coincidence, a friend running a small independent theater in Berlin told me that North Korean diplomats came to his office every week, always with a movie title list in hand and asking him to get them 35mm prints of those titles as quickly as possible. Probably, they were getting movies straight for Kim Jong Il’s viewing pleasure.
Anyway, my friend introduced me to those diplomats and things went on from there. I got invited to Pyongyang in 1999, watched movies there for a week, then selected about 10 of them and took them on a tour through Europe.
I got invited back to Pyongyang for the film festival in 2000 but basically, after the tour, my direct involvement with the North Koreans ended.
At that Pyongyang visit in 2000, though, I bought a book called Korean Film Art which more or less catalogued the major North Korean films up to 1985.
With that book and the North Korean films I had seen so far as a base, I started to research the history of North Korean cinema.
Why? Because it seemed nobody else had done that before. Well, people have done it but they didn’t publish much about it in English. So, I just went deeper and deeper into it, found more and more material over the years… and I’m still love exploring North Korean cinema. North Korea is such a secretive place… but you can learn a lot about it from watching their movies. I don’t believe in any of the messages they try to get out with their movies… but I can see what kind of messages they try to get out and how they do it. Their films reveal a lot about North Korea’s genuine outlook on the world. Because those movies are basically made for a domestic audience, they don’t hold back in what they tell… they deliver the direct messages the leadership wants to convey to their people. Fascinating stuff.
Just seen news that China’s vast appetite for co-productions with other nations seems to have crept across the boarder into the DPRK. “Promise in Pyongyang” received its first screening on June 27, 2012 and by the looks of the preview video on youtube (which I can’t say for certain is genuine) it looks like a beautifully-shot tale revolving around the Mass Games.
My first thoughts on seeing the preview are how good Pyongyang looks in these scenes. The DPRK film industry has been surviving on archaic technology which means even contemporary films look like they were made 20 years ago. Obviously the Chinese cash and equipment have been put to good use.
The language appears to be in Korean and Chinese, but what is most curious is that the subtitling is in Chinese and English. Perhaps they are looking to crack the international market? Or maybe they are just adhering to the convention of all films being released domestically in China have both subtitles.
Below is the release information Rodong Sinmun about the film’s preview in Pyongyang.
A preview of the DPRK-China co-produced film ”Promise in Pyongyang” took place at Taedongmun Cinema on June 27.
Present there were Pak Chun Nam, vice-minister of Culture who is director of the General Bureau of Film, officials of ministries, and movie creators and artistes, media reporters and editors.
Attending it were members of the Chinese film delegation headed by Tong Gang, director of the film management bureau of the Chinese State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, Ambassador Liu Hongcai and staff members of the Chinese embassy in Pyongyang, Chinese people staying and Chinese students studying in the DPRK.
