10 Most Fascinating Films Produced By Brutal Governments
A happy-go-lucky film from North Korea? Erm... OK?
As Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek said “Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn't give you what you desire - it tells you how to desire”. And so it should be no surprise that films have been utilised as tools of propaganda pretty much since their invention.
One of the earliest epics of cinema was DW Griffith’s Birth Of A Nation, still renowned as a revolutionary piece of filmmaking but despised for its overwhelmingly positive portrayal of a crusading Ku Klux Klan saving innocent white folks from ape-like African-Americans. Ever since, cinema has been a powerful weapon of propaganda for the most brutal political figures in human history. From the Nazis to the Soviets to the North Koreans and beyond, the same medium that gives us massive superhero blockbusters each summer has also been used to justify genocides and dramatise discrimination.
While many of the Hollywood films you watch use the guise of entertainment to slip ideology past your eyes and into our brain, the films on these list resorted to no such subterfuge and often simple bashed their viewers over the head with ideological propaganda.
As well as terrifyingly effective propaganda pieces, many of the world's most repressive and savage governments have produced fine pieces of entertaining cinema in their own right, perhaps all the more fascinating for the ferocious forces that produced it.
10. Comrade Kim Goes Flying
This is the most recent entry on the list and probably the most bizarre. Comrade Kim Goes Flying is a joint British-Belgian-North Korean produced Rom-Com made in 2012. Yeah, take a moment to soak that sentence in before you shoot over to Amazon to buy ten copies of the Blu-ray.
The film follows Comrade Kim Yong Mi, a North Korean coal miner who dreams of becoming a trapeze artist. Kim pursues her acrobatic dream even in the face of opposition from famed acrobat Pak Jang Phil in a movie described by its British co-director as a a "girl-power fairy tale about dreaming to fly". The film went down a storm in the secretive, repressive Stalinist state itself and apparently trapeze artist turned actor Han Jong-sim became an instant sensation.
Co-director Nicholas Bonner, who had more than a decade’s experience exploring and documenting life in North Korea, claimed he was inspired by, of all things, girl-power football film Bend It Like Beckham.
The film payed at both the Toronto Film Festival and a South Korean Film Festival and when it played in the United States in 2013 it was warmly received by The Wall Street Journal.