'We were all propagandists; the only differences were our goals.'
Looking for respite from her crumbling marriage and determined to stop a coal seam gas mine near her Sydney home, filmmaker Anna Broinowski finds wisdom and inspiration in the strangest of places: North Korea. Guided by the late Dear Leader Kim Jong Il's manifesto The Cinema and Directing, Broinowski, in a world first, travels to Pyongyang to collaborate with North Korea's top directors, composers and movie stars to make a powerful anti-fracking propaganda film.
The Director is the Commander centres around the bizarre twenty-one day shoot Broinowski did in North Korea to make her documentary, Aim High in Creation! She meets and befriends artists and apparatchiki, defectors and loyalists, and gains a new insight into the world's most secretive regime. Her adventures are set against a parallel exploration of propaganda in general: both in its ham-fisted North Korean form and its sophisticated but no less pervasive incarnation in the corporate West.
Funny, multi-layered and utterly compelling, The Director is the Commander is a gripping account of an extraordinary journey inside a nation we can usually only see from the outside looking in.
Aim High in Creation!
( dir. Anna Broinowski
)
Australia
:
Antidote Films
,
2013
6350899
2013
single work
film/TV
'Fearing that a gas mine is about to be built right near her home, Anna Broinowski (Forbidden Lie$, MIFF 2007), in a world first, goes to Pyongyang in North Korea to meet the masters of propaganda filmmaking: directors, cinematographers, composers and movie stars. Over three weeks they instruct her on how to make a drama in which "heroic workers" overthrow the evil gas miners – executed in the Dear Leader's proudly melodramatic style. As part of her research, Anna even acts in a North Korean movie, playing an "evil American secretary" in a military thriller being shot on a real, captured US spy ship, the USS Pueblo.
'Back in Sydney, Anna's fearless Western cast follow North Korean instructions in a bizarre Kim Jong-il boot camp – with socialist ideology training sessions, the repetitive use of song, workshops on how to act with a "love for the common people" and "hatred of the class enemy" – culminating in an uplifting, anti-capitalist plot guaranteed to inspire workers and farmers everywhere to throw off their capitalist shackles and unite!
'Whether the actors deliver a film so powerful it stops the mine, and is hailed from Pyongyang to Cannes as the greatest thing since Dogme, or whether it's a glorious turkey of which only Kim's son (and perhaps Lars Von Trier) can be proud, one thing's for sure: the MIFF Premiere Fund-supported Aim High in Creation! (which world premieres at MIFF) is a film that forges an astonishingly human bond between North Korea's filmmakers and their Western counterparts, proving that no matter what type of enemy you're fighting, we are a family.'
