Why North Korea is so good at propaganda

it's late afternoon on a warm winter day in 1978 and South Korean actress Choy unhe is walking along a secluded beach in Hong Kong 40 ft away a woman she knows stands on the shore motioning her to come over a few strongl looking men stand by her side Choy feels uneasy like something bad is about to happen and she's right she's been lured here as Choy walks over to the woman a speedboat filled with more strongl looking men pull up to the shore the men watch as Choy approaches and when she gets near they nod

at each other they grab her and they force her into the boat their destination North Korea Choy was kidnapped to be forced to star in movies for the North Korean leader Kim Jong ill this is a story about film and Cinema in the scariest country on Earth but really this is about a Storyteller Kim Jong the second leader of North Korea a man who could change the weather with his mood and who invented the hamburger in the year 2000 even though it had already been invented and one thing about Jong ill is that he loved

movies he used the art and craft of Cinema not only as a tool to indulge his own creative dreams but also as a way to drill his propaganda into the minds of millions of North Koreans to hold on to power cementing him and his family as the powerful Leaders of North North Korea hey before we go on did you know that there is a market of people and companies that do everything in their power to know more about you about your birthday about your address about your online activity about your preferences so that they can

take that and sell it on an open market to corporations that want to Market to you I hate that it's gotten so out of control my emailing box is a mess my phone is always ringing and it's most of the time it's robots I am done with this luckily there exists a solution and that solution happens to be the sponsor of today's video thank you incog incog is a service that takes you off of these lists which is not an easy thing and actually a few years ago I tried to unsubscribe myself like I tried

to go through this process and I actually failed like I could not do it luckily incog exists so the way it works is you sign up and you give incog permission to reach out to data Brokers on your behalf to exercise your rights to not be on these lists like we all have a right to do this but the process is so complicated the the number of data Brokers is so great that none of us will actually unsubscribe from these lists incog deletes personal information from dozens of data Brokers I've been on incognate monitoring the

progress and I am very pleased with what I am seeing I'm getting taken off these lists left and right I am on my journey to be rid of all of this spam and that is a very satisfying reality so you can get this at a massive discount at least if you're click the link in my description which is incog docomo Harris and go sign up and get 60% off incog get a huge discount and start your journey of getting rid of your personal information from all of these marketplaces what you're paying for is privacy incog

is here to help protect us from what has become a very malicious industry of data Brokers thank you incog for existing and for sponsoring today's video let's get back to Kim Jong ill and all of his wild [Music] Shenanigans we watched as many North Korean films as we could get our hands on to make this video and let me tell you this is a world of Cinema unlike anything you've ever seen it's one full of farmer revolutions and extreme nationalism and women frequently sacrificing their lives as well as a lot of music spontaneous Odes to

the great leader and some really colorful [Music] operas so I want to let you into this world and show you how this happened how this one man's Obsession drove him to literally kidnap people in the name of making movies movies that he used to brainwash his people but also movies that he hoped would help fulfill his dream of turning North Korea into a center of worldclass [Applause] Cinema up near the Misty volcano of Mount peku in a modest log cabin enshrouded in dense snowcapped forest the great leader opened his eyes for the very first time

the thunderous rain stilled the dark clouds parted and through them a glimmering double rainbow emerged arching its way across the muted morning sky and a bright new star appeared overhead making its debut in the Open Heavens The Shining Star of peku had arrived well at least that's the story that most North Koreans were told in reality the year was actually 1941 likely at some Soviet military base in Russia there probably weren't any rainbows or new stars created it's probably just a normal day oh and his given name wasn't even Kim Jong ill it was yur

ovich Kim right that's like a total Russian name as an adult he rewrote his backstory again and again over the course of like 20 years and this is our first big clue about Kim Jong ill the second leader of North Korea he was a story story [Music] tell the legend goes that when he was 7 years old he was watching this North Korean film called my home Village he was with his parents and after the movie This 7-year-old Jong ill marched up to one of the filmmakers and told him that the winter scene in the

movie didn't feel lifelike because the falling snow wasn't actually collecting on the character's head like it didn't look natural and instead it looked like what it actually was which was cotton balls totally lowbudget and unacceptable the filmmakers were so ashamed that they reshot the scene without the falling snow and re-released the film Jong 's obsession with movies grew over time till he eventually collected 20,000 bootlegged VHS and DVDs that were stored in an airconditioned Library manned with 250 full-time employees like this guy was serious about his movies and he would watch these movies like all

the time everything from Hollywood westerns to Classics like Friday the 13th and Rambo to Japanese monster movies like Godzilla he was a big fan of American stars like Elizabeth Taylor and he apparently loved Daffy Duck and the James Bond franchise well that is until a Bond film came out where North Korean leaders were like the enemies he was actually pretty insulted with that one but this guy was a full-blown scena file like he watched so many movies that his dad Kim hsung the founder of North Korea was actually pretty concerned that his obsession had become

unhealthy but soon Kim Jong 's dictator dad would find a way to use his son's Obsession to stay in power okay so this story is kind of nuts it's 1967 North Korea is still kind of a newish country like a couple decades old Kim Jong 's dad is still the leader dictator who's running the country has all the power but he's got competition from other powerful people within the party that want him to step aside and make way for a new leader these men want to steer North Korea in a New Direction by choosing their

own successor to him and this competing faction starts to use film as a tool to get the people of North Korea on board they make a movie celebrating the life of this aspiring successor trying to lay a groundwork for a new cult of personality around this guy not kimlong big mistake kimil s is not going to let this happen he goes straight to his Film Studio in the capital pongyang and he gives a speech he warns the whole film department that someone in the party is trying to glorify themselves which is super not communist and

there using film to do it so Kim says to all of his filmmakers we need to step up our game in securing power through film and then he asks if anyone has the courage to guide the film studio correctly meaning to make more effective propaganda that will keep Kim ilung and his family ower oh and look who's in the room film buff and Son of the dictator Kim Jong-il The Shining Star he's watching quietly in the back of the room and then he speaks up saying that he would nobly volunteer to be the head of

the film studio to help level up North Korean Cinema to help hold on to power something must have clicked for kiml Sun at that moment his son who was not a promising candidate for his successor he was helplessly obsessed with movies but here he is stepping up finally passionate about politics because politics and film are now kind of the same thing it was clear that if there was any position that he would fit into this was it so he promotes his son on the spot to lead the propaganda and agitation Department the department in charge

of all movies plays and Publishing within North Korea retelling this story of North Korea to its people reframing it as something glorious keeping the people indoctrinated to the version of reality that keeps the Kims in power and using film to do it the struggle for the future of North Korea was happening on the Silver Screen and now Jang ill had his hand on the dial in control of what he called this powerful ideological weapon [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] getting into the mind of an artist can be hard but in this case not really if there's

one thing Kim Jong ill like to do it was to talk about his thoughts on Cinema he wrote an entire book about it which was kind of the impetus of this entire video this book on the art of cinema by Kim Jong ill when I was hanging out at the North Korean border last year I had this book with me and I would like read it in between stops and it's actually kind of good at least parts of it like a lot of it's like garbage but like there are parts that actually like I was

like oh yeah you got this like this is basically the Holy Bible of North Korean film making and it dictates how movies in the country should be made I mean the book spends a lot of time making it crystal clear that filmmakers are an extension of the government and they are charged with the noble task of leading the ideological Revolution via storytelling devoting their artistic skill to the party's Endeavor to build socialism and communism in other words filmmaker's job is to make clever propaganda for its people this isn't unique to North Korea since the invention

of the motion picture governments of all kinds have used the power of Cinema to tell their story in their way often sugarcoated often inaccurate to the facts but I'm telling you North Korean Cinema has its own weird wild [Music] flavor this is the great age of chuche chuche is the foundational ideology of North Korea it has its foundation in Marxist communism like from the Soviet Union but it has an obsessive focus on isolation and self-reliance and it glorifies independence from Outsiders in this book Kim Jong ill makes it very clear that to make a successful

North Korean film that characters should quote live work and struggle with the conviction that they are masters of the Revolution and the work of socialist construction a lot of clunky language here I'm not sure if it's just a bad translation or if Kim Jong ill is just a really writer and anyway it goes on to say that the characters in these films should accept the full responsibility of solving their own problems without any outside help you can see this obsession with self-reliance in this movie called myself in the distant future there's a scene where this

tractor is like plowing a field and it breaks down but it's not a problem for these good communist Farmers look what happens next they step up they pull out their sickles and they harvest the rest of the field by hand with smiles on their faces they don't need Outsider technology from the big city to make their lives easier they're self-reliant oh and right before this scene all of these Farmers had just broken out into spontaneous poetry chanting about dedicating their lives to North Korea during this like Poetic chanting there's just like shots of Mount peku

really nice b-roll not because it has anything to do with the story but just so we remember that like Mount peku is like super important cuz that's where Kim Jong-il was born but he he really wasn't born there another big theme is struggle in the book he quotes his beloved father kiml s quote the life of a revolutionary begins with struggle and ends with struggle this is really good propaganda because you've got ju and struggle as like the foundational ingredients you start to see stories that glorify and give meaning to North Korean suffering like this

1989 film called the broad Bell FL sort of a love story where Like This Woman's lover like gets exiled from the town and there's this tension on whether or not she should leave her hometown for a different life and then the father of the main character comments very wisely that it's actually better to stay and struggle to find happiness like glorifying the struggle and in case it didn't come through the first time near the end of the movie the main character finds out that her lover is trying to come back to the hometown that he

deserted and she's confirmed on how right her father was struggle is the only way to achieve [Music] happiness so now all over North Korea you have starving people cut off from the world economy because of their despotic leader watching these movies stories about how it's actually the most noble way to live the key to happiness the noble ideals of self-reliance the regime made sure that everyone saw these films way out in the countryside in factories Farms Army units and all of this helped North Korean citizens reframe their country's Reckless dictatorship into a protector of an

eternal Revolution that must continue to fight against outside evil there's a whole chapter in this book that Kim Jong ill writes to screenwriters he tells them to think of their stories as seeds again this is actually like pretty profound if not applied to propaganda he tells these screenwriters that they need to quote equip themselves with the ideology of the party translation choose stories that will stick in people's minds that will grow that will turn these people's suffering into fuel for North Korean nationalism and pride pride in the country that's causing the suffering in the first

place there's one movie where this football player trains ridiculously hard all in the name of quote achieving the teachings of the fatherly leader kiml to turn North Korea into a kingdom of [Music] sports he ends up training ridiculously like way harder than and everyone's like dude you're crazy you're like training too hard and he's like no I have to do this to glorify my country [Music] for these nationalistic PumpUp movies pair nicely with films that rewrite the story of North Korea the history the story of Japanese Occupation of the Korean Peninsula which was indeed brutal

and deserves to be told accurately because it was bad enough but these movies just like so overly caricature Earth glorifying the revolution against capitalists and landlords or showing these caricatured battle scenes where the Koreans defeat the Japanese in a good old flying martial arts scene and while these ideologies and these messages are kind of baked into the story often times they're just sort of shoehorned in in the form of like a music break where these characters just sort of randomly burst into songs about how their struggle is good for the future of their country [Music]

these unwarranted music moments are everywhere in North Korean films in this chapter he says that these films must have music that has revolutionary passion that moves people to strive to defend what is new and [Music] Noble he says that songs should be short simple easy to understand and to sing infectious catchy so that people will sing along and get it stuck in their [Music] head okay so in watching all of these movies we were surprised that these films give a surprisingly significant role to [Music] women so this is actually a feature of a lot of

communist propaganda which she's traditional female roles as in line with the ideals of like a model communist comrade submissive identities being determined by their relationship to the family to their communities in this case and most importantly to the state community-minded submission Stalin actually used the same trick back in the 30s creating art that appealed to quote the feminine identification and submission so you see this in North Korean films like in this film girls from my hometown where the main character is this country girl who shows her dedication to her country country by pledging to take

care of her husband who's newly blinded after coming back from a war as an act of sacrifice for her country in this film called the name given by the era the main character gives up going to college to lead a construction and take on the grueling task of building a dam why because hard work and struggle benefit the country and that is the most important thing in all of these stories but by female sacrifice we can literally mean like sacrificing their lives like in this film where this woman risks her life in the midst of

like this storm mudslide chaos scene all in the name of saving these sheep that were sent to her community by the government or in this film song of retrospection where the main character uses grenades to blow herself up so that she can destroy the oncoming South Korean enemies to save the rest of her Squad using all these principles Kim Jong Il ran the film studio he created dozens of films that were his best shot at telling good stories but really mostly propaganda for his family's political agenda to keep control over his people and it worked

Kim Jong 's dad stayed in power the people stayed subservient and indoctrinated to this fantasy of Eternal Revolution and the glorification of struggle and Jong-il got to make movies but despite all of this success there was still one major problem the film still kind of sucked and Jong ill the guy with a collection of 20,000 movies that he watched all the time kind of knew that they sucked I mean of course they sucked his filmmakers weren't allowed to watch foreign movies oh not to mention that they weren't even allowed to leave the country so yeah

these films were kind of just in an echo chamber of predictable characters lackluster cinematography and the same plots over and over with a bunch of shoehorned like poetry and Opera like music breaks they weren't good and Jong ill knew it his solution steal people from the outside who could make his films better so it's the 1970s and Choy uni is one of South Korea's most popular actresses she had been married to this South Korean director ctor Shin sang A and they had recently divorced but up north Kim Jong ill is looking at these two as

the potential solution to his problem so he has his men go to Hong Kong and pose as businessmen apparently interested in starting a production company with Choy they lure her to Hong Kong for a meeting and this is how she got grabbed off a beach at repulse Bay she gets sedated thrown into the boat and they take her back to North Korea where they put her in a government building in pongyang a few weeks later her ex-husband the director Shin goes to Hong Kong to look for her he's in his car and suddenly the car

in front of him stops blocking the road and forcing him to stop a few men get out of the car come back and open Shin's door and put a nylon bag over his head the tie rope around his ankles and they take him into their car he too is now on his way to North Korea Kim Jong ill greets Shin when he arrives to pongyang and he explains what he's up to he wants him and his actress ex-wife to make him propaganda movies but Shin refuses so Jong ill sends him to a labor camp for

five years okay so fast forward to 1983 Kim Jong ill decides that the two are finally enlightened whatever that means and he throws them a party and tells them that yes they're still prisoners but they can make whatever movie they want he even apparently like apologized and shifted the blame of like the whole labor camp thing to like other officials and said that he was too busy to notice how poorly they were being treated like this guy sounds literally insane they don't really have much Choice here so they get to work and over the course

of their years in captivity they made six movies for their captor one of the films that Shin directed became a classic and this is the film I'm like most excited to show you this is pulgasari this film seems to be a ripoff of a 1962 South Korean film called bulgasari which was largely inspired by the Japanese hit Godzilla we all know Godzilla we'll never actually know because the bulgasari South Korean film was apparently lost soon after it was released anyway the point is Kim Jong-il wanted a monster movie he wanted this to be so good

that he even broke his rule of not letting Outsiders come in to work on his movies so in addition to the stolen director that he had already kidnapped he started recruiting the people who worked on the Return of Godzilla a year earlier over in Japan including the actual guy who was in the Godzilla suit as well as the man who led the special effects like he had like the Dream Team oh and of course to get them there he lied according to the guy who played Godzilla he and his crew were told that they were

heading to China for a shoot and instead found themselves in North Korea okay so now Jong 's lifelong movie fantasies are in reach maybe just maybe North Korea could make like a international Blockbuster he's got his kidnapped director and all these technicians to make his monster movie [Applause] great yeah no this didn't work out Kim Jong ill was still overseeing the whole thing so the film still was like full-blown propaganda employing all of the North Korean cinematic tricks that Jong ill laid out in his book so of course you've got the requisite ju self-reliance scene

showing the villagers getting water from a well and farming got to show that got the overarching plot that outside help AKA pulgasari does more harm than good more on that in a second and then there's the requisite female sacrifice when this blacksmith St daughter hides inside of a bell so that pulgasari who eats metal will eat the bell and simultaneously eat her and if she dies then pulgasari dies too because they like formed this like blood bond in the beginning of the movie it's a whole thing anyway pulgasari himself is said to be a manifestation

of capitalism in society the farmers love him at first because he helps overthrow the king all in the name of promising these people individual freedom but then they find that they've created a monster who needs to feed on steel and iron to grow more and more powerful and it gets out of control so the farmers just keep feeding him and feeding him with all their farming tools but then they have no way to sustain themselves so the only thing they can do is stop the beast from growing which means killing him meaning Revolution but and

this is where it gets really juicy there's another way to interpret the film remember who's directing it this kidnapped South Korean director some speculate that the director used the film to create an analogy for the tragedy of North Korea where Kim ilung who at first was helping liberate his people from oppression and occupation turned Power hungry ended up starving the people demanding their resources using the revolution to feed only himself Shin the director later said that the film was an anti-war anti-authoritarian theme so take it you like I mean this film's wild but in Kim

jong-il's eyes this was a massive success and Kim Jong-il was feeling good and he let up a bit on shin and Choy allowing them to travel to Vienna for a film festival where they could maybe meet a financing partner who could bankroll a new project a North Korean film on genghiskhan but of course when they got to Vienna they found their way to the US Embassy and got asylum in the United States of course Kim Jong ill was enraged when he found out about this he actually went back and took sh 's name off of

all the films that he had directed and ordered a nationwide mandate to discredit him he called Shin a traitor and his name has become unmentionable without punishment in North Korea so yeah that is the Bonkers story of North Korean Cinema in 1994 Jang 's dad died and he eventually Rose as the new supreme leader of North Korea his love for movies continued to influence the form of North Korea in propaganda and they even started an International Film Festival in pongyang and the only people on the invite list were like all the countries that North Korea

vibed with like Iran Egypt India Vietnam and China oh but this wasn't just during the Cold War the festival was still going up until the pandemic a few years ago it's one of the few North Korean functions that actively seeks connection to the outside world Kim Jong ill died in 2011 but his legacy in North Korean Cinema remains super super strong one of the most recent films that we know about came out in 2016 and it's the same old ingredients female sacrifice extreme nationalism unwarranted praise for the current leader Kim Jong-un and of course no

shortage of spontaneous song breaks [Music] [Laughter] [Music] hey everyone hope you enjoyed this video I Know It was kind of long and in-depth um but boy we could not stop ourselves there was too much here and there's so much more that we couldn't include one of my favorite kind of video lately is where we go super deep into like some Niche that I would never think to go deep into but you start to pull on a thread and you just can't get enough and that's what happened in this case so I I hope you enjoyed

it um let me show you something hold on I made a poster look I've never made a poster before I finally made a poster it's one I've been wanting to make for a very long time it's called all maps are wrong because they are all maps are wrong in a sense um we're trying to you know take the spherical Earth and put it on a flat piece of paper and to do that we have to stretch it in all these weird ways and this map kind of celebrates that and reminds us of it and turns

it into kind of art but it's like smart art yeah smart art we'll call it the fact is uh this is a way that you can support our Channel if you're interested in that and also get this wonderful poster you can see the link in the description um for where to go find this poster The Newsroom is our patreon community where we publish an extra video every month too um you also get access to a bunch of other perks that you can check out over at patreon.com Johny Harris Luts and presets is what we use

to our videos and photos uh this helps us make our photos and videos look more beautiful I started a travel company a few years ago it's called bright trip and it is a place where you go to get smarter about traveling and to travel in a smarter way and that's basically it for me of all the things I have going on that I wanted to tell you about um thanks for being here and for supporting the work that we do just by being here and commenting and being a part of this discussion I really value

this community and excited to keep making stuff see you in the next one what's that sorry [Music]