A revolutionary spirit

Flemish director Anja Daelemans made the film with British director Nicholas Bonner and North Korean director Kim Gwang Hun. Daelemans, the producer of two Oscar-nominated shorts, ran into Bonner at a film festival in 2006. Over “a little too much whisky,” she says, they hatched the idea of making a feature film in North Korea. (The only other westerner to have that distinction was an Italian director of exploitation films in the 1980s, who brought in several Italian actors.)

Who you know

But Bonner had the experience and contacts to make it a project that seemed within the realm of possibility. Based in Beijing, he is well known to North Korean authorities as he has long organised tours of the country – a country nearly impossible to get into without a connection like him. He has also produced a few interesting documentaries about North Korea, which were (some would say miraculously) approved by their government censors and widely released.

So Daelemans, who runs the production company Another Dimension of an Idea in Lubbeek, Flemish Brabant, and Bonner sketched out an idea for a feel-good story about a clever and headstrong young woman who dreams of abandoning her life as a miner to become a trapeze artist in the big city. They made contact with Kim, a prolific North Korean filmmaker, and formed a directorial trio.

It took six years, but the film was finished in 2012, has screened at a handful of festivals and opens across Flanders and Brussels this week. And it is exactly the film that Daelemans wanted to make. “I’m interested in politics, of course, but I’m not interested in making movies about political situations,” she says. “I want to entertain people. When I go to the movies, I want to be entertained; I do not want to come out depressed.”

In Comrade Kim, 20-something Kim Yong-Mi (played by real-life trapeze artist Han Jong Sim) works in a coal mine in rural North Korea. But she’s also a talented gymnast, entertaining the other mine workers with her handstands and backflips. Yong-Mi has always dreamed of flying like the birds in the sky, as we see from the opening scenes when she is still a child and her mother is still alive – a mother who encouraged her to follow her dreams.

So when Yong-Mi travels to the capital Pyongyang to expand her skills with other young workers on a construction site, she immediately heads to the state circus. One thing leads to another, and eventually the determined Yong-Mi gets her own shot at trapeze stardom.

Comrade Kim is a “taboo breaker” in North Korea, says Daelemans. The country in fact has an active film industry, but all the scripts are subject to state censorship, which insists on propaganda messages of an ever-victorious and morally pure North Korea. Some of their films have been known to rewrite history. Aside from these movies, North Koreans see very little cinema. Once a week, a foreign film is shown on the state-run television channel, usually a Chinese or Russian drama. Foreign films are not shown in cinemas, with the exception of the annual Pyongyang International Film Festival, which screens movies from around the world. The films are carefully chosen, avoiding, for instance, any sex, but the locals still flock to the festival to get a glimpse of the outside world.

Keeping it real

Comrade Kim, though, is one of theirs – and yet different. “The main character is a woman, and there is no strong man next to her,” explains Daelemans. “She does her own thing and follows her own dream. And the men she works with support her in that. In North Korea, that kind of film doesn’t exist.”

For westerners, it’s a different kind of film, too, a kind of throwback to 1960s Disney movies in which charmingly naive young people solve crimes or get mixed up in other adventures. It feels like a movie for children: I have no doubt that if Comrade Kim was dubbed in Dutch, it would be a sure-fire hit in Flanders. And yet it’s a strangely fascinating movie for adults, too, intercut with creative animation sequences, carried out in Belgium, and oddly nationalistic lines like: “The working class can do anything if we believe in ourselves!” or “Everything can be achieved with a revolutionary spirit” or “You are the daughter of our coal mine and of Korea”.

According to Daelemans, this kind of dialogue makes the movie authentically North Korean, which was very important to them. “If you take out those lines, then it becomes something the North Korean people would not understand, and it would remove all the local colour,” Daelemans explains. “As much as possible, we took away the kind of ideology that you always find in North Korean movies, but you cannot take away everything because then the North Koreans wouldn’t recognise it as their own. But we do not consider it a propaganda film at all.”

Neither does South Korea, which made an exception to its policy of never screening North Korean films and included Comrade Kim in its Busan Film Festival last autumn. “People came up to us afterwards and thanked us for making a non-propaganda film in North Korea,” notes Daelemans. The North Koreans are equally enthusiastic; 50,000 there have so far seen the film. Daelemans is hesitant to say that this success will open up North Korea to more co-operations with the west. But she also thinks that the west doesn’t try very hard.

“Through the whole process, there was respect and trust, and we tried to find common ground to overcome cultural differences,” she says. “There were no hidden agendas. We did not go in there and play the leaders. If you respect and trust one another, you can get very far.”

www.comradekimgoesflying.com