Lights, camera, censorship: inside the North Korean film industry Comrade Kim Goes Flying, 2013 Now we have Comrade Kim Goes Flying, Bonner's first feature film in North Korea, and the country's first co-production with the West. A romantic comedy set amid the sweat and skill of the People's Circus, it tells the tale of a young coal miner (Han Jong Sim) who cheekily defies authority to realise her dreams of becoming an acrobat. Bonner says it's perhaps one thing for a Westerner to get Han Jong Sim in the lead role - she is not an actress but a trapeze artist - but it is quite another to get Ri Yong Ho as her on-screen boss. "He's the George Clooney of DPRK," a hero of 30 films, explains Bonner. Comrade Kim took six years to make, cost £1.2million (from "private sources") and is possibly unique in being a film where the director wasn't permitted to visit some of the locations - the scenes at the coal mine and the steelworks outside Pyongyang (although he insists he could have got permission if they'd had more time). I'm here with Bonner at the Pyongyang International Film Festival, where the film is to have its North Korean debut. It's easy to see why Bonner has so many friends - he's fun to be with. He's certainly a contrast to Pyongyang, which for an Asian capital is unusually quiet. Cars are mostly too expensive to run. ("The average North Korean still can buy one or, if he or she is lucky, two kilos of rice with his entire monthly salary," according to the Asia Times. There are, however, growing numbers of wealthy entrepreneurs importing goods from China.) So people bicycle or use the trolley bus. Inhabitants of Pyongyang live better than most North Koreans but the city is still subject to chronic fuel shortages. At night, students gather to sit and read under street lights in the city's one brightly lit street. Comrade Kim has already premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival (a "kitsch hallucination and a disturbing freakout," said The New York Times). And yet Bonner is surprisingly nervous. I ask which audience he values most - Western or North Korean. "North Korean," he says with some passion, "I wanted to give this film to the Korean people," then criticises himself for sounding "naff" and starts again, "I wanted it to work for a North Korean audience but be accessible to a Western audience as well." He says he got the idea when he met Anja Daelemans, the Belgian film-maker, at the Cantonese Film Festival in 2002. She is Oscar-nominated for two short films, so she knows the film business. He wrote and co-directed the film with the North Koreans Kim Gwang-hun and Ryom Mi-hua, whom Bonner describes as a "magician." Ryom works at the Korean Film Export and Import Council and her father is a cinematographer at the Korean Film Studios, the production studios in Pyongyang. There is only one owner of film studios in North Korea - that is, the North Korean state. They first met in 2001 when she helped Bonner and Gordon make their first documentary, The Game of Their Lives (2002), about the North Korean football team that beat Italy in the quarter finals of the World Cup in 1966. Bonner is eternally grateful to Ryom and she is happy to rave about Bonner. Nick has worked for 20 years with our country, so we feel quite relaxed. She says that the script started out "too much like Nick. We had to cut some of the jokes. Film: Sea of Blood, 1969 The North Korean film industry is governed by the film ideals of Kim Jong-il, who ruled from 1994 when his father, Kim Il-sung, died, until his death in December 2011. A film enthusiast, Kim Jong-il realised the propaganda value of film; his book, On the Art of the Cinema (1973), tells you how to make a film. And it's not a suggestion. First you have an idea: say, the mass killings during the long period of colonial Korea (Sea of Blood, 1969); or a patriotic girl joins the resistance movement under the Great Leadership of Kim Il-sung to drive the Japanese imperialist foe from North Korea (The Flower Girl, 1972). Having hatched your tale you find your actors with the right "ideological and artistic qualities to play the part." Improvisation is not encouraged - "leads to error" - but high emotion is required, not just to give the film juice and spark, but as a means of "intensifying the ideological influence of a production." The choice of director is also key. South Korean director Shin Sang-ok was regarded as one of the finest film-makers in South Korea when, in 1978, North Korean agents kidnapped his wife, the actress Choi Un Hui, and then, when he went searching for her, Shin himself. Kim Jong-il wanted Shin to make films for him. He refused and was put in prison. After five years, Shin was freed and agreed to collaborate with Kim Jong-il until his escape in 1986. His best known is Pulgasari (1985), inspired by Godzilla, about a monster who liberates a band of oppressed farmers. "He just loves movies," said Shin of Kim Jong-il, in an interview in 2005. But his favourites are adventure movies, like Indiana Jones. He had a fondness for Elizabeth Taylor too. Kim Jong Il gives advice at the shooting of "An Jung Geun Avenges Hirobumi Ito," a narrative film. Credit: AP Images Kim Jong-il's influence on the film industry is huge. Kim Il-sung visited the Korean Film Studio 24 times and gave 640 instructions. Kim Jong-il visited 600 times and gave 2,400 instructions. At its height in the late Sixties to mid-Eighties, the studio was producing around 40 films a year. But it's still in operation today. When I visited, the film in production was Pueblo, about the US Navy spy ship boarded and captured by North Korea in 1968. "Korean people like films," confirms Ryom. Every district in Pyongyang has its own cinema and all over the country, there are cinemas. People like to go to the cinema on Saturday and Sunday - mostly in the evenings after work [Sunday is the only day off during the week]. Korean people like comedy films very much and some of them love high emotional films, drama. Foreign imports tend to be exclusively Chinese or Russian dramas which is why the Pyongyang International Film Festival (also sponsored by Koryo Tours) is so key. First launched in 1989, as the Pyongyang Film Festival of Non-Aligned and other Developing Countries, the biennial festival lasts for 10 days and is one of the few opportunities North Koreans have to glimpse the outside world. But with one caveat. "Sex is not uncommon in our films," said a Swedish film-maker at the festival. They're not even allowed to kiss in North Korea. At first, Comrade Kim was rejected by the studios. People assume it's because there wasn't a goody hero and it wasn't all for the revolution. But it wasn't anything to do with that," Bonner stresses. They didn't think the story was strong enough. So Bonner and Ryom approached Kim Gwang-hun, a director of military films. More rewrites followed and the film was finally produced at April 25 Film Studio of the Korean People's Army - the first non-military film to ever be made there. Within seconds it's clear it hasn't been made for a Western audience. It opens with a bucolic scene of a mother in traditional dress and the acting is pantomimey. On the other hand, it's not typically North Korean either: it's pacier, not so melodramatic. The heroine of The Flower Girl spends half the film in tears. Bonner had to fight to stop his heroine getting caught up in the same tradition. We kept on saying, she's a strong girl, she's not going to cry. She may be upset, but she won't show that. It annoys Bonner that some see Comrade Kim as an apology for the regime. Certainly, the North Korea that comes over on screen is benign. The trams aren't rusty, the heroine gets a bus from the countryside to the city without being stopped at a checkpoint and her family has lots to eat. "It's a fairy tale," says Bonner. Of course it's not relevant to what's going on in North Korea. His hackles are up and you sense it's something he has to defend a lot: that he is helping prop up a system which is pretty evil. But the more time I spend with Bonner, the clearer it becomes that his prime motivation is to give the North Korean people a break from the usual propaganda: whatever Westerners may think of Comrade Kim, it's very different to what North Koreans normally get to see. "North Korea is very clear what it is and I probably know more than a lot of people, but I think you've got to pick your battles," he says. Politics is on one side, NGOs are on the other and what we do is in between. Bonner presents himself as apolitical, but then it's in his interests to do so. "Nick engages with the individual rather than the regime," says Josh Green, co-founder of Koryo Tours. "North Koreans are not the Taliban," adds Simon Cockerell, managing director of Koryo Tours, "they are motivated by earthy and material things too. They may want the removal of American soldiers from South Korea, the final victory of the Juche idea [absolute political and economic independence] and Korean-style socialism, but the average person doesn't wake up thinking, "Death to America." They get up and think, "Bloody hell, I'm late for the bus."" North Korean visitors taking a break on a mocked up street at the Korean Film Studios. Credit: Patrick Wack for Seven Magazine The main contact tourists on Koryo Tours have with everyday life is through their translator-guides who are fluent in English and able to explain anything from the co-operative farm system to the number of television channels: three (but only the "news" channel broadcasts daily). In the 20 years he's been coming, Bonner has made close friends and seen huge changes. In On Making Cultural Life Prevail (1989), the book that has for decades been the country's fashion bible, Kim Jong-il issues all manner of edicts: for example, "footwear must match one's clothing and physical constitution; and it should be kept clean." But Bonner is seeing more Chinese influence: "Groovier hairstyles and shoes like wedge trainers. But still, if you point to a Mickey Mouse T-shirt and say, "What's that?" They'll go, "A mouse, duh." I love that! Cockerell says he's seen "evidence of cosmetic surgery, around the eyes, probably done in China." Last year he spotted a man in knee-length shorts. This reflects Bonner's approach: to build bridges between DPRK and the rest of the world and reshape understanding of what both are about. Either by bringing the world in: tourists, footballers, films. He brought Middlesbrough FC Ladies to Pyongyang to play two matches against local Korean teams in 2010; helped to get Bend it Like Beckham broadcast across North Korea in 2010. Or by taking DPRK out - documentaries, art, footballers. He was the drive behind five North Korean painters producing work for the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art show in Queensland, Australia, in 2009; and is working on a project to take a women's football team from here to Europe next year. It would be naive, however, to think that Bonner succeeds on charisma alone. Nick would not be able to do what he was doing if somebody wasn't reassuring the regime in some form. Some of the people he's dealing with are quite well placed and they've been willing to ease the way with people in the regime," says a senior official who lived in Pyongyang. Nick Bonner after the debut screening being interviewed by local reporters from such newspapers as the Pyongyang Times. It's a delicate balancing act. Koryo Tours was banned from North Korea for six months in 1997, after a tourist turned out to be a Channel 4 reporter. "I remember with A State of Mind, Nick and Dan worrying about how far they'd pushed for certain bits of the film to be left in," the senior official says. It could go wrong at any point. It would only take one tourist to step out of line. "Nick has pushed further than probably anybody else but the system makes sure there is a limit to how far you can go," says the official. But the biggest censorship Bonner has encountered so far has not been from DPRK. The Australian government declined to allow the North Korean artists to attend their exhibition at the show in Queensland because their work was "the product of North Korea's propaganda machine." Bonner grew up in Cheshire, where his father worked in advertising and his mother was a housewife. He had wanted to be a country ranger or a landscape architect, until he met Josh Green in Leeds. Green was studying Chinese at the university; Bonner was studying landscape architecture at the polytechnic (now Leeds Metropolitan University). Green had already worked and studied in Beijing as part of his degree. After graduating, aged 24, he was charged with setting up an office for TNT couriers, in the ministry of trade, off Kim Il-sung Square in Pyongyang. He returned to Beijing a few months later, and in the summer of 1993 Bonner, by now lecturing first-year students at Leeds, came to visit and decided to stay. "China was fun and wild, the art scene was warming up," he recalls. Through Green, he met Kim Chol, who worked for the Korea International Travel Corporation (the company which Koryo Tours still works with) in Pyongyang. Later that year they took their first group of visitors (mostly friends) to Pyongyang. Bonner was beguiled. I really warmed to the people. They are fascinating. Bonner and Green launched Koryo Tours from an office in Beijing the same year. Today, Bonner lives in Beijing with his girlfriend, Antonia Cimini, an Italian journalist and producer, in a flat you can hardly get into because there is so much art. His collection includes more than 1,000 works of DPRK art dating from the Fifties. "Not collectable yet, but I think it will be," he says. Cimini's only public comment on her boyfriend is: "Nick is trying to give North Koreans the chance to live a life like his, a life made of judgment, of contact with different things and people, and the possibility to make one's own choices." Back in Pyongyang, Comrade Kim is screening to a packed audience of locals at the Pyongyang International Cinema House. Outside, street vendors are selling snacks; inside the audience are laughing and clapping, but also seem puzzled. "It is not a typical DPRK film," says one, after the film, "it is different and new." One member of the audience wasn't sure what to think so fell back on a default option. It teaches me that I will try my best to bring up my child as a loyal daughter of our General and to do her duty. Later that night, Bonner has just left a post-screening party for Comrade Kim at a restaurant, where Ri Yong Ho thanked Bonner "for promoting our country to the world." Standing on a pavement in the dark street Bonner speaks passionately and a little drunkenly about his hopes for the film. It's been a big struggle and I'd like people to watch it. I always hate it when people write books and you find them in the two-for-one bargain bin. It's a very beautiful film. I hope it will be a classic in North Korea and I hope it will get really good status in the West. Follow SEVEN magazine on Twitter @TelegraphSeven