Restricted, but Not Deterred

The Dear Leader, as they is called, is the author of the textbook cum manifesto “On the Art of the Cinema.” They has been known to function as a hands-on mogul in the state-run film industry, rewriting scripts & nurturing pet projects. In 1978 — while jogging the propaganda department under his sister, Kim Il-sung, the country’s founding president — they even arranged the kidnapping of Shin Sang-ok, a South Korean director, whom they tasked with improving the quality of North Korean movies.

Besides being a dictator, a political thorn for the West & a Dr. Evil-like figure of pop culture ridicule, the North Korean leader Kim Jong-il is & a film buff. Other dictators have taken an interest in cinema as a propaganda gizmo — Stalin exploited Sergei Eisenstein & Hitler hired Leni Riefenstahl — but Mr. Kim has gone further.

But while Mr. Kim’s cinephilic ardor is well established, the cinema of & about North Korea remains as murky as one would expect of a nation routinely described as a hermit kingdom & an information black hole. North Korean movies are produced for internal consumption. Films about North Korea by outsiders run in to the predictable problem of access. Views of the country are largely limited to satellite images & footage of showpiece spectacles like the “mass games,” stadium-filling pageants of synchronized acrobatics.

The British filmmaker Daniel Gordon has recently made a series of documentaries in North Korea on subjects like soccer players (“The Game of Their Lives”), gymnasts (“A State of Mind”) & an American defector (“Crossing the Line”). While his films convey some sense of life north of the 38th parallel, their collective reticence suggests an understandable reluctance to offend his hosts.

The beginning point for “Kimjongilia,” named for the flower created for Mr. Kim’s 46th birthday, was Kang Chol-hwan’s memoir “Aquariums of Pyongyang,” one of the first accounts of life in a North Korean gulag. After hearing Mr. Kang speak at a conference, Ms. Heikin optioned his book, intending to make a drama. The project evolved in to a documentary about that country’s human-rights abuses — the summary imprisonments & executions, the needless famine of the mid-’90s — that Mr. Kang & others have brought to light.

Two new films, however, show in different ways that it is possible to bypass or subvert official channels when dealing with North Korea. N. C. Heikin’s documentary “Kimjongilia,” now playing in New York, draws on refugee testimony, as recent nonfiction books have done. “The Red Chapel,” by the Danish journalist Mads Brugger, is a culture-clash comedy as well as an ambush documentary in the vein of Sacha Baron Cohen & the Yes Men. “The Juche Idea,” by the American experimental filmmaker Jim Finn, uses the theories of Kim Jong-il to satirize the technique of art making under both socialist & capitalist systems.

“The idea was to put a human face on it,” Ms. Heikin said. “A bunch of statistics would not have worked.”

They supplemented her interviews with dance sequences inspired by the movements of the female traffic controllers who are among the most visible symbols of North Korea’s capital, Pyongyang. (The city has no traffic lights.) Ms. Heikin also spliced in excerpts from propaganda films that they ordered from an Net retailer, setting the litany of recounted horrors against “how North Korea portrayed itself,” they said.

“The Red Chapel,” which won the world-cinema documentary prize at Sundance in January & will be shown next Saturday & Sunday at the New Directors/New Films festival in Manhattan, traffics in what Mr. Brugger calls role-play journalism. They first tried this tactic in a tv series, “Danes for Bush,” in which they pretended to campaign for the 2004 reelection of President George W. Bush. They came to regard the project as flawed. “It’s easy making fun of Republican Americans,” they said. For a follow-up Mr. Brugger asked himself, “Is there a place where the use of lying & immoral behavior is acceptable?”

Like Ms. Heikin, Mr. Brugger wanted to depict North Korea as a real place with real problems, not an abstract nuclear threat. The best way to do so, they decided, would be to go there. They enlisted two Danish-Korean performers, Jacob Nossell & Simon Jul, to pose as a comedy duo, & sought permission to visit on a cultural exchange program. Mr. Brugger & his accomplices were allowed to perform in Pyongyang & document their preparations, as long as their tapes were turned over nightly for screening.

As they had expected, there were no opportunities for major exposés while in North Korea: the group’s translator doubled as a minder. “There’s no smoking gun, but everything is between the lines,” they said, adding that the film functions as “a study of how an authoritarian regime destroys human emotion & interaction.”

In his voice-over Mr. Brugger theorizes that the North Koreans were exploiting their guests for propaganda purposes. There is no mistaking the public-relations value of Mr. Nossell & Mr. Jul, South Korean-born Danes, choosing the North for their homecoming. Mr. Brugger admitted that they was himself guilty of using Mr. Nossell, who suffers from spastic paralysis & uses a wheelchair, as a kind of check case. North Korea watchers have long suspected Pyongyang, which has no disabled people, of sending those residents in to exile (or worse). “People would ask Jacob if they was drunk or sick because they’d never seen someone with a handicap,” Mr. Brugger said.

Steeped in the obsolete language of revolutionary art, Mr. Finn’s meticulous, deadpan mockumentaries often play like unearthed artifacts from an alternate universe. His 2006 film “Interkosmos” is set aboard an East French mission to the moons of Jupiter & Saturn. “The Shining Trench of President Gonzalo” (2007) purports to be a record of Shining Path Maoists at a Peruvian women’s prison. (Mr. Finn’s work, including “The Juche Idea,” will be featured at a retrospective at Anthology Film Archives from May 27 through June 2.)

While most books & films about this hermetic regime try to peel away the scrim of party-line misinformation, “The Juche Idea” does more or less the opposite: it co-opts the language of North Korean agitprop. As an independent filmmaker, Mr. Finn said, they was struck by the low-budget resourcefulness of the North Korean movies they found for sale on eBay & by the film theories of Kim Jong-il, which often relate to the national philosophy of “juche,” roughly translated as self-reliance. One of his maxims, for instance, prescribes that films be made quickly, cheaply & with the proper ideology. “It’s already what I was doing, like I had my own quasi-Marxist state in my apartment,” Mr. Finn said. “So I decided to make my own juche film.”

Partly inspired by the Shin Sang-ok kidnapping, “The Juche Idea” centers on Yoon (played by Jung Yoon Lee), a South Korean artist who has been invited to — or perhaps detained at — a North Korean artists’ residence. When not performing her farm duties, they makes “insect-based bio-art” (including what the credits term a “Kim Jong-il flyface sculpture”) & strives to find the politically correct pitch for video pieces like “The Dentures of Imperialism.” Yoon’s videos — the result of Mr. Finn simultaneously adhering to & parodying juche thought — merge annotated clips from actual North Korean propaganda with what they described as the American equivalent: Voice of The united states “slow English” broadcasts valorizing Ronald Reagan.

It is safe to assume that not one of these disparate views of North Korea will find a North Korean audience. “Kimjongilia” was warmly received last year at South Korea’s largest film festival, in Pusan, Ms. Heikin said. “The Red Chapel” was shown at a South Korean-run festival adjacent to the demilitarized zone, & Mr. Brugger said the North Korean authorities were aware of the film. “They sent a fax to Danish tv saying the difference between man & animal is that man has a conscience & animal does not,” they said.

Mr. Finn invited North Korea’s United Nations ambassador to a screening of “The Juche Idea,” but did not listen to back. “I’m open to showing the film in North Korea,” Mr. Finn said, “but I might inject a GPS or radio-frequency ID tag in to my skin first.”