
North Korean Film Madness
Kim Jong Il's obsession with cinema runs deeper than most dictators' hobbies: he reportedly owns one of the largest private film collections on earth, named Gone with the Wind his favorite film and Elizabeth Taylor his favorite actress, and wrote a treatise called "On the Art of Cinema" in which he crowns himself "Genius of the Cinema." VICE correspondent Shane Smith travels to North Korea to try to get inside the Korean Feature Film Studio, a state-run production lot west of Pyongyang that once turned out around 40 films a year under Kim's direct patronage. Smith works the trip as an outsider trying to talk his way past official minders and closed gates, and the film uses that access problem as its structure: what does and doesn't get shown reveals as much as what's on screen. The strangest fact surfaces almost in passing, that when Kim couldn't find a filmmaker willing to make the movie he wanted, he had one kidnapped. The studio itself, glimpsed from outside, is the film's only real evidence of the industry it's chasing.