North Korea News Podcast by NK News - How North Korea uses feature films as a social weapon – Ep. 342

Episode Date: May 15, 2024

South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol held his first comprehensive press conference in 21 months last week, during which he discussed Seoul’s relationship with Moscow despite Russia’s burgeoning ties with North Korea. NK News Lead Correspondent Jeongmin Kim (@jeongminnkim) joins the podcast to discuss more of what Yoon had to say, as well as a balloon […]

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So most recent news. Well, it was interesting. Last week, President Yun gave his first press conference in almost two years. Were you there for that? No, unfortunately, I didn't make the cut. I got caught off, although I registered. But many of my other foreign media colleagues went and asked fantastic questions. Thank you very much, everyone.

Great, great. What did he have to say that's relevant to us here at NK News? Well, firstly, when it comes to North Korea, we all, many of you might not remember, but when Yoon started his term, like if you remember back a lot of episodes, we talked about Yoon's hot-headed moments, right? He used to talk about-headed moments right like he used to talk about preemptive strikes he used to talk about the kim jong-un leadership how north korea is a main enemy so on and so forth he used to focus a lot on north korea but i guess the most notable thing to me in relations to this topic and the listeners here would be that his hot-headed remarks are gone. He was very tame, and whatever questions that were linked to North Korea,

although it was kind of linked to other foreign policy questions, he only referred to North Korea when it comes to North Korean threat, in line with how U.S.-South Korea extended deterrence is important, and so on and so forth. So that was one thing. But another thing that got the most media interest, international media interest, was his response to Russia-North Korea military cooperation issue. What did he say about Russia-North Korea military cooperation?

Well, technically, the policy line didn't change. So the logic is the same, but always the president's remarks are important, not just with the content, but about their tone, right? And his tone changed slightly when it comes to North Korea and Russia. The question was, what I actually wanted to ask as well, North Korea has been allowed to basically test its weapons that are made to use in attack against South Korea in Russia's battlefield in Ukraine. And the question was, and you have, South Korea has been doing a very limited response to this military cooperation. And do you have any red line against Russia that South Korea would not stand? Which was a very good question, I thought. And he sidestepped the question, of course, did not answer what the red line is. And a lot of foreign media correspondents, we

expected his response to be something like, oh, sanctions. Russia is doing this illegal invasion of Ukraine and North Korea's provision of these weapons are violation of U.S. Security Council resolution, period. I thought he will just end at that. But he started his response with, Russia has been a very friendly nation with our country for several years, many, many years. But recently, we are in a different and difficult, uncomfortable position. But I would love to maintain an amicable ties when it comes to economic relations and take Russia's relation to a case by case basis. take Russia's relation to a case-by-case basis. He did accuse Russia for the illegal invasion,

but he did not really go into how such North Korean weapons are dangerous to South Korean security. He did not touch on anything related to South Korean military, but he focused on the economic ties with Russia, which raised a few eyebrows in D.C. Gosh, okay, yeah. Interesting. I wonder, actually, I've wondered this aloud a few times, but whether there have been any North Korean observers spotted in Russia or on or near the

battlefield watching how North Korean weapons are performing, because I think if that does happen, if they do get verified as being in the area, that may change the response a little bit from South Korea. Right, that's what we have been seeing, actually, right? A lot of different types of North Korean weapons. And just yesterday, TV Joseon did this exclusive about North Korea's new types of weapons going into Russia's arsenal. But South Korea's response has been the same. They have not responded above how this is sanctions breach. And they tend not to respond to anything related to its potential risk against South Korean military. But also a lot of military experts like Ankit Panda, they also pointed out that although a lot of the missiles are, I guess, malfunctioning in

the battlefield in Ukraine, there might be other variables than just the technical capability of these missiles that are impacting that, such as the shipping period as well. That might be also influencing the missile functionality. Coming back to President Yun's press conference, has there been any response either from Russia or the United States to his words? Not really, because from Russia's point of view, this is very fond answer, I guess that they can get in this time, this day and age. When it comes to China, he actually did not make that much remarks regarding that. And also because only four questions were given to foreign relations related stuff. And we didn't really ask people really

didn't ask China or Taiwan related questions. It was just Ukraine, Russia, and the possible return of Trump, which he also sidestepped the question. Right. Okay. Wow. Now, I understand that Park Sang-hak is back, the prominent North Korean defector who likes to stage media events around the sending of balloons to North Korea. to stage media events around the sending of balloons to North Korea. So what's he up to these days? Just yesterday, it's been a while. I used to always cover this, but there used to be more. But then after, you know, the anti-leaflet law going into effect,

there were much less activities, although he always did it occasionally. He was one of the 27 people who filed the anti anti-leaflet law to the constitutional court. So and he won. So so it was ruled unconstitutional infringement of freedom of speech. So this was actually the first time that he did a balloon launch after the anti-leaflet law was found unconstitutional. And this time he gave media media very good, I guess, headline sound bite by including K-pop into the mix. I mean, into the USB to be more specific. So it's not just leaflets, it's USBs. Okay. So it used to be, I was wondering if I should do a cheeky headline linking gospel to K-pop, but I didn't do that, Brian's idea but um he used to put bibles and into the

balloon alongside leaflets and u.s dollars but this time it was i guess was it 300 000 leaflets and usbs in 20 balloons i think wow okay gosh we don't uh know for sure if there are any bts fans in in north korea but uh if there, they may find some of these USBs. Has anyone from any of the K-pop management companies made a complaint or a comment about this? I wonder whether they're happy or if they don't care too much. I actually, when I reached out to Park Sung-hak and asked, can you tell me which artists that you included into the USB? Do you know who's popular these days in North Korea?

And he said that he included, of course, Jungkook and V from BTS. So I included that as the kicker quote. But I did try to reach hype. I actually did, but they did not respond. I understand they're busy with other matters these days. They are very, very busy these days right now. Now, moving right along, former President Donald Trump, who's running for re-election,

he's been, of course, busy lately with his trial in New York, but he did have some time to say some things about what might happen to the U.S.-Korea alliance and the U.S. troop presence here if he becomes president once again. So fill us in on that one, please, Jongmin. Covering this gave me, I guess, a PTSD of sort of covering all his crazy remarks during when he was a president that he would tweet out. And this was one of those things, but it was a time magazine.

He said that South Korea is very wealthy right now and implied that the U.S. could withdraw troops from this wealthy South Korea if it doesn't pay more to defend against North Korea. And he sort of reiterated these longstanding grievances about defense cost sharing. But then this is my eloquent, fancy, smart version of his remarks. But the Time magazine interview, it was like this. We have a lot of tools. We have a lot of troops. One thing we can do, there are a lot of options. We can move them out very quickly to certain locations. And he went on and on and on about how he championed the cost sharing negotiations so that South Korea can pay more. False. He failed. The negotiations stalled at the time. so Biden administration negotiated later. So he did a lot of false accusations or false remarks about how many troops are here from the US, US, USFK soldiers are here.

But bottom line is he's he referred to how wealthy South Korea is in that US is not interested in paying that more. Okay, now I know that it's been a topic of discussion in South Korea lately that if U.S. troops were ever to be withdrawn, this might be the time for South Korea to get its own nuclear weapons. And recently the CSIS made a statement about that based on some research, some polling of South Korean elites. So tell us about that. Right. I actually interviewed Victor Cha, the main author of the report for Korea Pro. So if anyone's interested, check it out. I did raise a lot of limitations and doubts and questions I got from academics about this. I just

posed them directly to him and he actually accepted most of the limitations. But the bottom line of the CSIS, I would say research, because it's 150 something experts, it was difficult to make it into an actual formal survey. And he confirmed that as well. But it was interesting how at least South Korean elites, which includes policymaker, former and current officials, experts here, South Korean nationals, they are, you know, how Southorean public always sort of 70 say that they sort of want nuclear weapons when they're it's not a conditional statement right but only 30 or so wants nuclear weapons and 50 or so are against them and 13 are they don't really have a preference so it shows that that in, I guess, in default mode, they are not that

interested or really against it, considering the reputational cost, it seems even more so than the US South Korea alliance issue. But if there is a decoupling rhetoric, and the fear of abandonment comes back, 50% of the elites who previously answered that they are anti-nuclear weapons would change their mind. So the Yoon presser question about Trump's return and what his plan is was actually in line with this increasing, I guess, expert concerns about South Korean experts return to the idea of nuclear loving nation. But it's actually been quiet in south korea before this report oh but when you say so when you say elites so these are people mostly with phds or either university professors or think tank people right okay so yeah so so he responded that dr cha said that he had to

although it's anonymous so he couldn't really ask two specific questions about their expertise but helled their level of education and 80% was PhD holders. Okay. So of those people who responded to the survey, about half of them will change their mind and go pro-nuclear if there is a decoupling between the United States and Korea. Is that right? Right, right. But I try to push back on that because I did hear from a few experts the concern about methodology here because it seemed like he wasn't that clear on the threshold of the fear of abandonment because it could be as extreme as withdrawing U.S. forces from Korea to just decoupling rhetoric from someone like Trump. It seems like he didn't really gauge that in the survey. So that could be a bit of a loophole.

Okay. Well, I guess for me, still the definite take home here is how noticeable it's been in the last few years that nuclear weapons in South Korea has become part of polite conversation, whereas 10, 15 years ago, nobody was talking about it. And now we're doing surveys about it. We're talking about it at press conferences. So it's definitely part of the conversation now. I guess that's what Yoon earned, ironically,

after bringing it up in one of his other hot-headed remark incident in earlier last year, when he, out of nowhere, nobody asked him, out of nowhere, mentioned that South Korea has the technology and the capability to have our own nuclear weapons. But because we sort of really trust the U.S.,

we wouldn't do that. But after he mentioned that he got nuclear consultative group, he got Washington Declaration, he got a bunch of strategic assets visiting South Korea. If Trump looks at this and reviews this and see this as something like a concession, he would try to make a deal out of it, probably. Probably would, yeah. And that kind of brings us back to where we started. It's interesting that given the context of Yoon's previous hotheadedness that he came across as quite

temperate and measured at this most recent press conference. Well prepared. So in the Korea Pro podcast episode, just an hour after we saw the remarks at the press conference, John and I kept saying how clever and smart he sounded in a few occasions. We never, ever said that about him. So that was a change. It's true. I've never heard either of you say that about him before. So I do want to encourage our listeners to go across to careerpro.org and listen to the podcast that was released just last Friday, I think, between you and John. So go check it out. Thanks, Jongmin,

for coming on the NK News podcast this week. Thank you very much, Jackal. Welcome to a new realm of insights into the Korean Peninsula. At Korea Risk Group, we delve deep into the complexities of North and South Korea, offering bespoke analyses that empower decision-makers. Whether you're in government, business, or academia, our tailored solutions provide clarity in an opaque region. Let our team guide your strategy with data-driven insights and on-the-ground intelligence. Step into a world of informed decision-making and visit careerriskgroup.com today. Hello, podcast listeners. Welcome to the NK News Podcast. I'm your host,

Jack O'Swetslut, and today I have here in the studio with me Professor Benjamin Joannot, who's a professor at Hongik University. He is a French cultural anthropologist specializing in Korean studies. And today we're going to be talking about his massive film database that he has recently released to the public, as well as North Korean films. And then we'll finish up with a very interesting book that he has published in the last couple of years, co-published, co-authored, about doing research, doing fieldwork in North Korea. So welcome on the show, Ben. Thank you very much, Neko.

Okay, thanks for coming and making your time today. So first of all, this database that you put together, you and two collaborators have created this North Korean Feature Films Database, NKFFD for short, with almost 800 titles. Why bother? Why did you do this? And what was your aim at the start? Actually, I started because I was studying North Korean movies, and it was very difficult when I started more than 15 years ago, probably,

to get the materials. And I realized that there was no complete database, at least no database on which I could rely for academic research. So you're saying IMDB is not good enough? Yes. Yes, actually. at least no database on which I could rely for, you know, academic research. And then I started to get... So you're saying IMDB is not good enough? Yes. Okay. Yes, actually.

All right. No, you have bits here and there, but, you know, most of the databases are not databases you can use easily, like what I try to do, like on a kind of Excel file, you know. Yes. So you cannot research them and cannot complete them. And that's what was missing. And since I have a kind of anthropological approach, which is kind of close to structuralism,

it means I love to do lists and work with a certain quantity of materials. Okay. My approach is not per se quantitative, but I like to have a lot of movies to analyze, to see the patterns, the recurring patterns. That's why I wanted to have the possibility to get a kind of large picture of North Korean cinema, historically, diachronically speaking. And the database started like that, you know, one movie after the other, and then we ended up with

almost 800. Right. And and yeah it's on a google spreadsheet so it's like an excel format and just for our audience who may not have seen it yet but we'll share the link to this in the show notes so people can look at it you've got the korean title the english title official if there is one and if it isn't official it's in italics then the studio that made it the names of the the director the screenwriter the it, the names of the director, the screenwriter, the main actors, the length of the film, which year it was published, what's the genre, and is it in the collection of the North Korean Materials Center at the National Library down in Sochogu in Seoul, and whether it's on YouTube. So if it's on YouTube, you put a link there, presumably to the original

film, and then the last column, any other source. So that's pretty comprehensive. But you're saying that nothing like this existed before? It's very hard to believe that in 2022, that here we are, we've never had a North Korean film database before. We had. We had, made by several researchers, Korean professors who wrote books about North Korean cinema. We have a list, which is quite comprehensive, at the Pukan Shiro Center, the North Korean information center We have a list which is quite comprehensive at the Pukan Shadro Center, the North Korean Information Center at the National Library, etc. But none of them are

really comprehensive. They are, for example, at the Pukan Shadro Center, you have, I think, around 440 movies. More than half of your list. Exactly. But what's missing then? A lot of them. Yes, here and there. You know, it's not only a period of time. It's just that they did, all of them did what we have to do, which is rely on what we find by chance. For example, on the Chinese market, going to North Korea directly, what we can buy in North Korea. Right. And what is going around on the internet.

Okay. Because North Korea itself doesn't provide, I guess they have, but don't provide a complete list. You cannot go to North Korea to a library and say, I want to have a complete list of your movies. But it has published books on North Korean movies, but they don't include that kind of bibliographical detail? And these books were very important for us because I bought all these books.

And it was the base for us to, you know, crisscross the references to be sure that movies really exist. We are never completely sure, but at least going to the North Grand Source, it was a way to verify what we had. But even these books, for obvious political reasons,

are not complete. Okay. When you say political reasons, what do you mean? Well, we have been told in North Korea by colleagues who made us understand that some movies may disappear from the market, and even from North Korean television, from the distribution platforms. Can you think of reasons why that might happen? Yes, because the people involved in a movie are not anymore politically acceptable, the director or the actor, for example.

Now, okay, let me think of one example of a film that might fit into that category, and that's the film Dora Oji Annen Milsa, or The Emissary of No Return, or An Emissary Unreturned from 1984. That one was directed by Shin Sang-ok, the South Korean filmmaker who was kidnapped to North Korea under orders of Kim Jong-il.

And the script was apparently written by his wife, Choi Eun-hee. Now, that film is in your database. And in fact, when I was in North Korea in 2019, I was able to purchase the DVD. They're still selling the DVD of this, at least where foreigners are able to go. It may have even been in the small souvenir shop inside the Arch of Triumph in Paris.

All right, yes. Or the Juchita. One of those, I bought it there. And indeed, their names do not appear in the credits, so it's as if the film has no director. But the film is all there. Exactly. So if that is not a film that has disappeared what can you think of any films that definitely have disappeared and they wouldn't ever sell it or show it or talk um i don't have it in mind now but i remember going

to the moran bong shop yeah in pyongyang which is you know the big production company yeah and international distributor of north korean films and the ladies at the shop were a little bit you know uncomfortable with the movies I asked ah you had a list I had a list of things I was looking for yeah and they looked at each other and they were like you know and that's when uh some of the North Grand colleagues with us took me on the side and explained me you know these movies are exist but are not available anymore. Okay. Now, they weren't Shin Sang-ok films, were they?

No, it was not. But I know that other movies by Shin Sang-ok may not be available, like the Chun-yang version. Okay. That's what I've been told. Interesting, then, that the one about the Hague emissaries, they allow that one to still be sold but not this one. Okay, so that being said,

Benjamin, what's the big picture we can learn from this database? Well, there will always be a weak dimension in this database because it gives us an image of North Korean cinema, but it's a partial image, and we shouldn't forget that

because even though we have worked hard to find a lot of titles, first, we don't know if these titles correspond to a real movie all the time. Because some of them are just titles for us. We found them in different sources. And we have put online, of course, the list of the sources we have used. But sometimes they are, let's say, magazines, periodicals. So we don't have the DVD and we haven't watched the movie.

So we are not sure about it, even though we have all the credits. So that's complicated to know if a movie still exists. Many of the movies may have disappeared for political, but also for technical reasons, like in South Korea. We have lost a lot of movies from the 50s, 60s and 70s for technical reasons because they're reused, as you know, the film material. And that also happened. I know when I was a youngster, I was a big fan of Doctor Who, the original series,

and some of those original reels, this film was reused. Oh, really? So the original episode of Doctor Who from 1960s and 70s, some of those were actually missing. Oh, terrible. So sad. Yeah, so it's a bit like reusing an old VHS back in the day. You'd just go over

to Kim Il-sung. Exactly. Interesting. Now, when you say sometimes it's just a title, where were you getting that title from? If you've never seen

the actual film, where's the title coming from? As I said, we cross different references. Some of them appear in several books from North Korea, also from South Korean researchers.

And also we had a look at some of the periodicals, North Korean periodicals, which were published for a long time about North Korean cinema. And they would give you sometimes even the synopsis, the full scenario of a movie. And you get a lot of information through these kind of sources. But it doesn't mean that we can find the movie when we went, for example, several times to North China, to North Korea, and also going to the Pukan Shiro Center in Seoul. Some of the movies are not locatable. You cannot find them. Then for us, they are titles. That's why I wanted this database to be open, like a kind of open source so that people can intervene, give us comments and say, well, this movie, it sounds good, but it never existed.

And I have the proof and we exchanging this information to amend the list, you know, as we use it, because I'm sure that there are a lot of wrong information, information which are probably also redundant. So a movie may appear two times under a different title. That's what I'm afraid of that may happen. So this database is a working process. So was there a Joseon Yonghwa, a Korean movie's periodical at some stage? Yes, of course.

And when did they stop making that? I think it was around the 1990s, 97, I think. Okay. Now, I have to say, your experience is very much paralleled with my own. I have produced a database of North Korean comic books from the 1950s until the 2020s.

And I have, I think, 840 titles, so a little bit more than you have films in your database. But similarly, there is, for example, this annual book that's published in North Korea. I forget the exact title. It's got a long title, like Chosun Yesilpum something something Yollam. And it's basically an annual almanac of every artwork produced by North Korea.

And so it's divided up into chapters. And there's one on films. And there's one on movies. And there's one on books. And in the book chapter, there's a subsection of Kudimchik, which is comic books. And I have gone through that list for all the years where I can find that book. And so I have a list of, in my database, there are books that were in that almanac, but I've never seen them. And I've even been, when I was in 2019 in North Korea, I said, have you got this one?

Have you got this one? Have you got this one? They're only published in the last two or three years. And they said, no, we've not got them. Exactly the same for us. I'm not sure that every title that I've got has been published as a book. So that's interesting. Exactly.

Exactly. Because we use also this kind of annual Your Books for the cinema. And it's interesting because they give you, for example, the number of films for a movie which were circulating in North Korea. Right. So we don't know how many people watched the movie, but we know how many times it has been shown. So it can indicate if a movie in a certain way was seen as successful because it's all, of course, it's, you know, very official information. But anyway, it gives you information that are interesting. know very official information but anyway it gives you information that are interesting but that's also that's what i want to really emphasize is the the limitation of the database it's a work

in progress and we are going i hope with other researchers people like you who have interest in north korea to complete to correct to amend and there is still a lot of work to do for example in the last columns which are now empty yeah and I want to be able in the future to give the information where to find these movies. Right. If not on YouTube, then where? Outside of North Korea. Exactly. Now, this is the North Korean feature films database.

So what kind of films did you exclude from this? We exclude the short movies. We exclude the TV series. We exclude what we would call documentaries. Yes, the kwa-hak-yong-hwa. Okay. And children's movies, like animation. Okay, so animation is excluded.

All right. Now, you've got a number of genres that I saw in the database. Some of them are pure genres, and some of them are mixed or hybrid genres. Can you briefly tell us about what the genres are and how you classified the films? We used the North Korean classification

because we could, of course, always use another kind of frame, our frame, but that wouldn't be probably as meaningful as using what North Korean themselves indicate to us in their famous catalogs, you know, published in North Korean and in English. So it means that's the way they want us to see their cinema. So I thought it was more probably meaningful

to use these categories, these genres. And it's true that some of them apparently have only one or two movies inside, you know, like very few, very, very few. So you've got war. That's obviously a popular genre, as it is in comic books. And then you've got revolution, anti-Japanese movement, socialist realism, or socialist reality, I should say. That's different.

I would emphasize on the difference. Because socialist realism is something we know very well, historically, aesthetically speaking. But in North Korea, the word they are using, the expression they are using is slightly different. It is a genre of movies which deal with the everyday reality of a perfect socialist or ideal socialist society, which is North Korea, with the problems encountered in this kind of society and the way to overcome these problems in order to perfect the society. So this is, if you want, not exactly what we would call realism at all.

It has nothing to see, for example, with the Italian, you know, neorealistic school or British movies claiming to be realistic. This is actually more idealistic. Yeah, okay. A reality to come, I would say. And that's really interesting because this genre, which was especially popular from the 1980s, and that's why the data list is interesting

because you can see the evolution of the genre of movies according to the era. And from the 1980s, you have more and more of these socialist reality movies. And through these movies, you can see what are the problematics of North Korean regime according to North Korean society and industry and everything related to production, for example. And it tells us not what is exactly North Korea and how people live and what they do, but at least it shows us what are the problems.

And these problems are not always the same. So we have really an agenda of the day. That's why it gives us really this sense that contrary to what we may think or what some people may say, North Korean cinema, you cannot speak in general about that. It has a history. We need a history called contextualization of the movies because something produced in the 1980s doesn't have the same goals or aims or agenda than something which is more recent.

So that's what this database helps us realize. The war movies also or spy movies, espionage, it's more something from the 70s. It has a tendency to disappear after 1980s. During the 1990s, you don't have war movies. Well, you have, sorry. You have some movies involving the soldiers, which is different because not all the time it is a war situation. Right. But, and the historical genre of the Fatherland liberation movies, it is something also which is quite located in the early 70s and early 80s as well. I'll tell you what's interesting for me, just scrolling down the database here,

socialist reality seems to be the most common genre, or the biggest genre with the most films in it. And that's actually quite the opposite of how it is with the comic books. In terms of the revolution, the war, the espionage, these are very, very big themes in both the movies and in comic books. But socialist reality is almost absent from comics. Interesting. It doesn't appear at all. And yet it's the most common in movies.

in movies. But I'm not surprised because the essence of North Korean cinema, which is completely centralized, is not to be an entertainment. And that's why we call it cinema because we translate the word Yonghwa

by the English word cinema or what it means also in South Korean language. But we are in a completely different situation of production. So the end result should be also taken differently. These movies are not made for pure entertainment. If they are entertaining, it's nice.

But the real goal, and it is said again and again in all the North Korean literature, it is to educate. It is a weapon. It is a social weapon of education. And they use the word propaganda very clearly. It is to propagate the information of the day that people should get, how to behave, how to think,

what to say, what kind of vocabulary to use. For example, if we enter the Songun, army first era, people even in the far countryside have to know that the phraseology has changed. And how do they know that? By watching the TV, the news, reading the Rodong Shimun, but also watching movies.

And because it is a different kind of agentivity, which is expected from the movies. And this agentivity is purely educational. And we say propagandistic, but actually, we could see that it is also a way to inform the people of North Korea the citizens of North Korea of the questions of the day and the way to react to the situation of the present days and that's why this cinema has a different really different nature yeah nature from our cinema which is which is in a situation of competition. So you have this commercial dimension that we don't have in North Korea.

That changes a lot of things. And the other thing is that since it's really completely centralized, this doesn't reflect the society that it is, but it reflects the regime as it would like things to be. So it's a kind of mirroring effect is there, but it's different.

Yeah, it is very different. It's a top-down mirroring effect rather than bottom-up. And of course, as you hinted at there, Kim Jong-il in many of his books on the arts in North Korea, all artistic output must have this educational function. He explicitly rejects time and again art for art's sake. There is no such thing as art for art's sake. It must have this educational function, this societal function of showing society how it should be. It is literally described as a weapon,

so a moogie. An ideological weapon. Ideological weapon. And that's why I'm not surprised that for the children's book, it's quite different because the movies are intended to be seen mostly by adults. So the message is different. So that's probably the reason why in socialist reality it's less shown in children's book. So this database then that you've put together, obviously it can help people to research North Korean films, but are you looking at something bigger than that? Are you hoping that this will help people to gain a better understanding

of North Korean society as a whole? I don't think so, because, you know, reading a database requires a little bit of knowledge and work as well, because the database is just the door,

the gate to the question. After you have to watch the movies, analyze them, and a lot of them. Because I think, contrary to what do some critics, if you really want to do a sociological reading of movies, not only North Korean, you cannot do it with one or two movies. You can do it metonymically speaking, saying, OK, these movies represent a lot of other movies that I'm not going to speak about today. But at the end, you have to see a lot of other movies that I'm not going to speak about today. But at the end, you have to see a lot of movies to see the patterns. And that's why I think a database like this can help us.

For example, you want to know the movies from socialist reality genre from the 1970s. Then you can find a list of them and then work on that. And that's the beginning, I think. Do you have a personal favorite North Korean film? I do have a lot of movies that I kind of like. I wouldn't say that I love because you know North Korean cinema. It's quite demanding. I'm fascinated by the movies of the 1990s because you see the stress in which the society is.

This is during the arduous March period of the famine. Exactly. And you see some of the big changes. And even though it's not a funny movie, it's considered as a comedy because there is a happy ending at the end of the movie. It's, for example, a movie which is about a researcher who is specialized in potato. Oh, yeah. Yes. I think I've seen it. Uri Yorissa, our cook.

And actually, he's specialized in potato, and his wife is a researcher on rice. She's specialized on rice. And you have this kind of competition between the two. Right, because rice is the favored fruit in North and South Korea. Exactly. And potatoes are like the, well, if we have to, we'll eat them, but we'd rather have rice. Exactly.

But since rice during the Odious March is not something we should try to get because it's absent and then people have to eat something else. At that time, the goal of the regime was to make North Korean people eat and like corn and potato, which were easier at that time to get.

And they were trying to replace a lot of things from the Korean staple by, you know, things made with corn and potato. And that movie is showing this clearly. And it shows also how North Korean discourse can be very flexible depending on the situation, you know, the historical, political, economical situation. So 20 years later, before, you could have a movie which could be exactly the opposite, like Uri Hyanggi,

for example. Yes, I've seen that one on YouTube. Showing that, you know, North Korean people have to eat kimchi and doenjang. It's kind of part of their DNA. But at the same time, you can have a movie which says exactly the opposite and showing that potato is a delicious and wonderful national food.

Right, right. So that goes back to your earlier point that every movie is situated in the time that it was made. Yeah. So coming back to one of my favorite stories about Shin Sang-ok and Choi Eun-hye being kidnapped to North Korea,

and they worked on about 20 movies, 20 films, from 1984 to 1986 before they managed to escape to the West. As far as you can see, did their work have a major impact on filmmaking in North Korea more broadly, or was his legacy quickly forgotten and they went back to how it was before? Well, for me, it's difficult to say because I'm not a specialist of cinematographic studies. We should ask someone like Gabor,

who you know very well, who worked specifically on this. I think that, you know, first, Shin Sang-wook didn't do 20 movies in North Korea. He worked on several movies, but he didn't directly direct these 20 movies. Yeah, he directed about seven and he produced around 20.

Exactly. So if you refer that to the 800 movies that I found, and we are pretty sure that there are much more movies which were produced in North Korea than that, because many of the movies of the 50s

have completely disappeared, even in the list. So probably this was also on purpose. But anyway, if you see that, that on this 800 or so production, you have seven movies made by Shin Sang-wook, you can see that maybe he was influential in showing different filming techniques

to the technicians around him, other directors. So this is something which is impossible for us to decipher. What was this indirect influence on the people with whom he worked? That's why I cannot answer that question. A specialist of cinema should really see, technically speaking, what is the influence there. Okay, well then I have a whole bunch of questions. They may be wrong for you because they may be for the cinema expert, but let's just ask you anyway.

Is there an age that you consider to be a golden age of North Korean cinema? Once again, it's difficult to know because most of the movies from the 50s, the early age where you have absolutely wonderful movies in South Korea at the same time, you know, late 50s and early 60s especially, which is, you know, dubbed as the golden age of South Korean cinema. And we don't have these movies, most of them. We have very few which are left. Then it's difficult to say,

but I think that the movies in the 80s, late 70s and early 80s, are probably, yes, belong to this kind of golden age when a lot of money and efforts were involved in North Korean cinematographic production. And you have great movies at that time. They were also experimenting with different genres and you know the kung fu

movies and spy movies and they tried to make a kind of remake of the Titanic later. So which era again was it? Was that 90s? 80s I would say. Let's say 1980s. Because from the 90s, you still have movies, but you have less and less.

You have a lot of restrictions. You can see also that they are shifting from the regular film material to more video related movies. So the quality is sometimes less good. You're filming direct-to-video rather than with a 16mm film. Exactly. less good. Right, because you're filming direct-to-video rather than with a 16mm film.

Exactly. And, you know, before that, you can have, aesthetically speaking, cinematographically speaking, beautiful movies. I mean, the picture is beautiful,

but after, from the 1990s, it's more difficult to find that. And it is clearly very ideologically loaded. The film from the 90s, they have to deal with this arduous march situation. So you have movies about, a lot of movies about the industrial production.

And it's very technical as a subject. So when you are accustomed to watching Netflix, you may be lost with these kind of things. So although there are some gems, of course, in the 1990s. But as you know, after that, the production started to decrease as far as we know. And after the arrival of Kim Jong-un, the production has almost completely stopped. And after 2016, we couldn't find a movie. I was about to ask you about this. So why has there been this decline in the last decade plus since Kim Jong-un came to power? I mean, Kim is young. He presumably enjoys cinema,

maybe not as much as his father did, who reportedly had a collection of tens of thousands of DVDs. But why would that be? Is this purely a budgetary problem or is there something else going on? I'm sure it's not a budgetary problem because they do a lot of other things,

like building amusement parks and ski resorts and Dolphinaio. Yes, and nuclear weapons. Exactly. So I'm sure they could, you know, have enough money to make movies. They have the studios, they have the, you know, the staff and everything. No, I think apparently we have been told, last time I went to Pyongyang, it was in 2018 before COVID. At that time, there were no North Korean movies in the cinema theaters.

What was in the cinemas? There were Bollywood movies, Indian movies. We were so surprised. Really? Dubbed or subtitled? Subtitled. Subtitled in Korean. And why? It's because, you know,

these kind of Bollywood movies are, ideologically speaking, neutral. They are not dangerous. And you're certainly not going to see any sex. Exactly. And the people around us told you know north korean friends or colleagues told us that they were not very much into this kind of cinema but anyway they were in the theaters and i asked why don't we see any more any new north

korean movies and i was told that kim jong-un decided to halt the production in order to focus on TV dramas and series and make a better quality television series. So presumably everybody who was working, had been working in the film studios, they're not unemployed, they've simply been moved over to television studios instead, right? That's what I understood. Okay.

Are you familiar? Has there been a great output, an increase in output in television stuff? That's what I've been told. Exactly. But since I've been focusing on North Grand Cinema, because there is already a lot on my plate, I don Right. And what is also, I think, interesting for us is to see that Kim Jong-un reacts a little bit like his father did in the early 70s when he started to say, well, now let's do a lot of new style movies, North Korean style movies, and use them to especially to propagate the image of our father, Kim Il-sung, and his saga, his epic life through movies. And he was using the medium of the times. And now in the 2020s,

it's understandable that Kim Jong-un, who is younger, different generation, he wants to use something which is more related to our times, which is TV series. Shorter, yeah. Okay. Now, I noticed in your database that the very, very long-running series, The Nation and Destiny, Minjokgwa Unmyung,

which I think originally was supposed to, was planned to have more than 100 episodes, but there's only 44. But you've got it just as a single line item in your database rather than one for each film. Why did you decide to do it that way? Well, I think it has been divided in several cells as far as I remember, if I remember well. We have done that because we tried to put them together

as North Koreans do in their database or their catalogs. So they go by kind of bunches, if you want. Yeah. What are the other long-running series that I think there was The Star of Korea. The Star of Korea. The Chosun Epol.

Yes. Which I think was before kind of the nation and destiny was the successor to The Star of Korea. Exactly. And it is supposed to be

the longest feature film in the world history. Right. It purports to tell some of the history of Korea after 1945, right? Yes. And you have a lot of intricate lives and several characters, and it's super complex. Okay. Well, when I search for nation and destiny in your database, it only comes up once.

So if you have it divided into separate cells, I don't know. It didn't come up there for me. Okay. You know, that's interesting. That's something we have to work on for sure, improve this kind of thing, and I have to check again because I don't have everything in mind now. That's right. Listeners, I'm being unfair because I'm looking at the database,

but Benjamin doesn't have it in front of him, so perhaps a bit unfair there. In putting this database together, have you discovered any North Korean films that were remade? Same scenario, same basic storyline and all that,

but made... Except from Chunyang. Yeah. The story of Chunyang. Okay. I don't recall that situation. And another suggestion,

perhaps, for the database for the future, you know, you've got the last column there is for notes. I think it would be worthwhile putting in,

making a mark for any film that has a depiction of Kim Il-sung. Indeed. Because that's certainly a notable feature. That's one of the goals I have, actually. Yes, and films depicting one of the Kim family. Not only Kim Il-sung, but there are some movies where Kim Jong-il's image appears.

It doesn't appear in the movie itself, but you see a picture of him, a still. And that's usually when the hero or heroine has a kind of enlightenment. Right. So it's almost like a religious element. But it's really rare. So yes, that's something.

And of course, I have a separate list with these movies, so I want to add that in the notes section. You're right. And another thing that could be interesting would be if there are any foreign characters portrayed in the films and whether there's a positive valence or a negative valence because most of the time, especially if they're Americans, they're very negatively portrayed.

But sometimes, occasionally, you get a foreigner who comes to North Korea as a skeptic but leaves as a believer. It happens. There are movies like that with Japanese people. And also in the co-production with Russia, you have this encounter between Russian people and North Korean people in North Korea. And in this case, they are not negatively portrayed, of course, the foreigners. But when it comes to American, I haven't seen a movie yet where they are positively or neutrally portrayed.

So that may happen for Japanese and for South Koreans and also for people coming from the friendly countries. It's interesting that the Japanese, who normally in North Korean texts are portrayed as the uber villains, that they're allowed an opportunity for salvation, as it were, but the Americans are not. I think that's also something we have to put in the context because it has evolved with the time there are movies where the japanese are the archvillain yeah and some movies when probably because at that time there was a good relationship between north korea and japan the exchange of you know this uh zainichi yes you know during the uh the haven on earth campaign exactly so and when

also a lot of Korean people living in Japan decided to go back to North Korea. So there was probably a time when there was a kind of, what shall I say, a kind of sunshine policy between Japan and North Korea probably, and then the movies were made at that time. Okay, so you're hoping that by releasing this database to the public that this will become more of a collaborative project

that people will come in and add more and give more context and notes. Exactly. So I couldn't open the Google Sheet document to everybody because it would be dangerous. We could, you know, make a by accident, delete something. Or add a movie that just doesn't exist. Exactly. But that's why I just opened the comment function. So people can leave me a comment,

and then I use the comment and reflect the comment in the database later. Are you expecting to receive lots and lots of... Have you already received lots of comments since you were... I have received one by you. You were the first one, and as far as I know, the only one today. The database had been released, published, I think, one or two months ago. Yeah. Let's see.

Yeah, two months ago. So it's pretty new. And I'm trying to make it, you know, a little bit more widely known. But, you know, we are very, very few people on Earth working on North Korean cinema. I'm sad to say so. I don't expect a lot of comments. But my next goal is to make it more known by the South Korean public and researchers, especially. Because the database is bilingual, so you've got

the English titles where they're available. But everything else, the original title, the name of the director, the actors, etc., that's all in, I almost said Hangul, but Chosongul. Chosongul, exactly. Yes. Okay, now, so good luck with that. I hope you get lots of feedback, lots of comments, and are able to more accurately find the final list. In the last few minutes we've got remaining,

I'd like to talk a bit about a book that you published in 2021 that hopefully, I hope, will come out in English translation one day. It's in French so far. It's about doing fieldwork in North Korea. It's a book you co-wrote together with Valerie Galesor. I don't know how to pronounce this. I'm going to say faire de terrain. Yeah, exactly. See, that sounded much more French. Now, as I said, unfortunately, it's only available in French at this time. But give us a little bit of a summary. What's in here? Because it's a very, the way that it's presented, it's a very unique book.

It's not a straight text. There's a lot of non-prose material in here. Photographs, film stills, a quiz, humor, cartoons, drawings. So what's it all about? What are you trying to achieve with this book? Yes, actually, this book. So we are trying nowadays to work on an English version. So hopefully we'll have it in English. So we are trying nowadays to work on an English version.

So hopefully we'll have it in English. But the idea was basically to reflect on our arduous march on the field work in North Korea. Doing field work as a social scientist was challenging, is challenging. And nowadays, you know, it's not any more challenging because we haven't been able to go back to the field, you know, for several years because of COVID. But after several joint field work with other colleagues from France and Belgium, we saw that we were reaching a point when we had to be more reflexive about what we were doing. So going to North Korea and pretending that we can do field work, which is, you know, one of these methodologies which is central to a lot of social sciences,

like sociology, anthropology, cultural geography, even some historians have to use it, etc., etc. So if you don't, you cannot go on the field to see by yourself, you know, have direct observation. Right. You're not allowed to walk around freely in North Korea. You've always got reminders with you. So how is, yeah, how do you do field work in North Korea?

So it's very difficult. And we had to sit down and instead of just doing this attempt of field work, sit down and think about what it means to do field work. And not only in North Korea, but take the problem in itself, because there are so many other places in the world where doing field work is hard, dangerous. That's what we call the closed context. So, for example, if you do, as a sociologist, a field work in a jail, this is also a dangerous and closed context.

You don't have to go to North Korea to experience this kind of problems. You can have it in so many countries nowadays in the world. So that was also important for us to take a distance from the problematics. And since we were not able

to go back to North Korea and to go on with the field work and produce a more positive book, a classical academic book where you have a lot of facts. We decided to do anyway a book about the fieldwork itself since we couldn't do the book about North Korea as it is. It's a book about doing fieldwork in North Korea rather than a book of doing fieldwork in North Korea, perhaps. Exactly. So it's more a book for specialists

who are interested in that question. It can interest people who have no interest for North Korea because it's more about the methodological and philosophical question

as well. And it helps us also as researchers and authors to share a lot of things that usually you don't share as a researcher in a more traditional article

or an academic book. It is our emotions. What do we feel when we go there? Like fear, worries, sadness, and a lot of things that usually are blocked by the way we have traditionally to write the social sciences. And we wanted to play, to be a little bit playful and use different forms in order to kind of break that traditional writing of the social sciences. And, you know, it has been something really, really strong, important in the social sciences, especially anthropology, since the 1980s. And it became, it's growing and growing.

And nowadays, there are a lot of scientists trying to do social sciences another way. And for us, just to finish on that, the reason why we want to also give a lot of nonverbal materials like photos and drawings, etc. It's also that because we realize in North Korea that if you want to do a field work using only the traditional verbal interaction like interview, it's almost impossible. And I got the intuition that we should try something else. And we tried one year to do what we call mental maps, mental mapping. So instead of asking the informant, the people you want to interview, to answer your questions. And they could be very, what should I say, uncomfortable with this verbal and oral dimension.

We asked them to draw. To draw, in our case, it was simply draw your map of Pyongyang. So it can be the map of the area from where you live, going to work every day. It can be the general Pyongyang. We were very, you know, free. And that day, can be the general Pyongyang. We were very free. And that freedom and the fact that you don't use words, you can write words, but you're not obliged. It gave us amazing results and very promising. And that's something I would like to develop, the nonverbal fieldwork methods like collage and drawing because I think the ideological dimension of drawing,

for example, it is less strong. You know, drawing seems to be less loaded for North Korean people apparently. Because I'm sure they are told what not to say. They never have been told what not to draw. How interesting. And then they were much more free with their pencils. And I think that was so fascinating. It opened some hope for us.

And unfortunately, it was just before the COVID and the door closed. But that's also something we wanted to show in the book that using another dimension, which is less considered by traditional scientists, such as photo and drawing, is also probably something useful in our case. Do you have any plans to go back there again to do more fieldwork in the future? And do you think that's possible at this time?

We have, you know, we hear many stories of people slowly going back, tourists, etc. But since we have tourists from favored countries and members of favored groups like the Korea Friendship Associations, the Pro-Juche Study Association, that kind of thing. Yes, we have absolutely no vision, no horizon. What we have been able to do one year and a half ago already was to do a two-year seminar on Zoom. Believe it or not, I was so surprised it was possible.

With people in North Korea? With people in North Korea, with my French colleagues. We did that in France, but you know, it's Zoom, so it's actually not France, not North Korea. It's somewhere probably

in a computer in the States or I don't know. But anyway, we did this very interesting live seminar on two days, two long days of exchanging and with a lot of students in the North Korean classroom. I mean, graduate students, of course, PhD students and professors.

And it was really interesting. We saw that our colleagues were still there. They were in good shape. They went through the COVID. So we were really happy to see that. But we haven't been able to do more than that. What kind of things did you talk about with them? It was about, because we had that program,

a French-funded program on North Grand Cities. Okay. So it was about city and new cities, you know, and sponge cities and new technologies. What cities? Sponge cities, you know, like trying to regulate the water problems in cities, especially the, especially.

Yes. So they are super interested in these new alternative technologies related also to new energies. So that sounds like they're more looking at it from a geographical standpoint, not so much a social science, but more sort of geography. Yes, exactly. But it's, as you know, these kind of problems are intertwined with, you know, geography, but also techniques and sciences, architectures, urban planning, and also anthropology, because it can also play a role in the way we use the spaces. So it's at the crossroads. project that might be possible in North Korea, and maybe it's already been done, you can tell me, if I was a tour guide, a Western tour guide going into North Korea regularly with groups of tourists,

that interaction with my Korean tour guide partners from the KITC, an ethnography of Korean tour guides, that would be something that is possible? Exactly, and that's what we have in mind, actually. Has it been done yet, as far as you're aware? As far as I'm aware, no. And that's something we want to do. I think the proposition is in the book somewhere. And we want to do that. We want also to study hotels. Yes.

Because my colleague, Valérie Gillesot, she did already, with other colleagues, a book on East Asian big hotels, you know, like the Hyatt Hotel, etc., etc., where you know a lot of socialization is going on in Asia. You have the wedding halls, etc., etc. So doing something similar with North Korean hotels and do a kind of anthropological research or the dynamics of who is there, the meetings, because a lot of North Koreans who have money, they spend time in these hotels as well in Pyongyang.

So there are a lot of possibilities, yes. Okay, wow. That's a hopeful note to finish on. Let's hope that you're able to go back there, you and your colleagues, and continue the work there. And good luck with getting an English translation out there with Valérie Gélazot.

Give her my regards when you see her next. And also, of course, with this database, we'll share the QR code and the link on the episode show notes, and hopefully you'll get lots of response there. Thanks again for coming on the show today, Benjamin Joinot. Thank you very much for having me today. Get to the core of Korean insights with Korea Pro's exclusive Seoul event series. Join us for gatherings that bring you face-to-face with key opinion leaders, journalists, and experts on South Korean affairs for dinner, drinks, and more. Engage in deep discussions on political, economic, and social issues at special venues across Seoul.

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