by Bill Bryson
In the afternoon, we’re taken to Pyongyang International Cinema House, one of the festival’s main screening locations, on the same lot as our hotel. Its vast interior is lit only by skylights and strung Christmas lights. Our group, along with a couple of dozen locals, is ushered into a 100-seat cinema that smells like an old couch for a screening of 1972’s Flower Girl, one of North Korea’s most treasured movies. It tells the story of a peasant girl forced to sell flowers to afford medicine for her ailing mother, who has toiled for years in the service of a cruel family that collaborates with Japanese imperialists. In the end, the common people rise up to rid the nation of “landlords and capitalists.” North Korean legend has it that Kim Il-sung wrote the script.
In the audience is the film’s star, Hong Young-hee. Just 17 years old when the movie was made, she’s now middle-aged, with a gentle, motherly face and a perm—the Sally Field of the Hermit Kingdom. Before the screening, she reads a speech titled “Past, Present, and Future of Juche Film Art,” dishing about Kim Jong-il’s presence on set, where he offered wide-ranging advice on acting, costuming, and props. The Dear Leader “wisely led filmmakers to make ideologically and artistically excellent films,” she reads into the microphone. Kim couldn’t have said it better himself.
Unless treated as a historical artifact, Flower Girl is tough to watch. Lacking nuance of any form, it consists of three main components: weeping, crying, and sobbing. The acting is wooden, the pace painfully slow. I attempt to sleep several times, but the theater is too hot, the seats too uncomfortable. During the screening, North Korean TV cameras, there to capture festival footage, focus on us eight outsiders, blinding us with their lights.
Afterward, outside in the afternoon sun, Hong politely poses for photos with a few fans. When I ask through Miss P whether the actress still makes movies, Hong laughs quietly and says no, she’s just an “old lady.” Then she leaves, and that’s that. This is celebrity in North Korea.
On the bus, I make the mistake of asking Mr. O if he thought the movie was boring. He answers gravely, “No.” I immediately regret asking the question and tell him I found it interesting, though there was too much crying.
He nods. “A green nation cannot be happy.”
“Green?”
“Greeeive.”
“Grieving?”
“Yes. Cannot be happy.”
We watch movies. Some are North Korean—The Other Side of the Mountain, A Traffic Controller on the Crossroads—and others are foreign. We see Good Fellows, which is not a Scorsese remake but a gentle Iranian morality tale set in an elementary school. We also catch Bollywood superhero flick Krrish 3 in a 2,000-seat theater so oversold that people are seated in the aisles. The movie’s dance sequences allow for gratuitous shots of the hero’s oiled pecs and feathered mullet; in one musical interlude, Krrish dry-humps a female villain against a canyon wall. The audience loves it.
When we’re not watching movies, we talk about them. Every night, Roman, the Polish DJ, views a North Korean movie on a laptop as research for his master’s thesis, and he gives us plot rundowns the next day. I ask our guides about their favorite films. Mr. O is all about Nation and Destiny, the longest-running film series in North Korean history. Miss P says she doesn’t have a favorite, she’s seen too many. What about foreign movies? I ask. She leans in and whispers, “Titanic. It’s very romantic.”
Throughout the festival I take notes as discreetly as possible. Reporting is tricky in that I’m not technically allowed to report anything or talk to regular North Koreans about anything remotely substantial; in fact, before leaving Beijing I’d been made to sign a form that assured I wasn’t a journalist. (The pretend job title on my visa application was “independent travel promoter.”) Yuri is periodically forced to delete photos from his camera of soldiers or anything Mr. O deems “dirty.” At one point, Mr. O sees me scribbling in a notebook and asks, “Are you reporter?” He doesn’t look scared or angry, more like perturbed. I mumble that I’m just writing down my thoughts, and he makes a face like he’s smelled something foul. “Reporter!” he says, before climbing onto the bus. I stick to writing in my phone after that.
After a few days of moviegoing, Miss P and Mr. O take us to North Korea’s holy place: the Kumsusan Palace of the Sun, where Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il lie in state. On the bus over, Miss P briefs us on the palace’s many formalities: Empty your pockets of everything; don’t cross your arms; don’t hold your hands behind your back or in your pockets; bow on each side of the leaders’ bodies; etc.
Once inside the Sun Palace, visitors are made to stand on a moving walkway and examine several decades’ worth of framed pictures of the leaders. Most depict them delivering the family’s patented field guidance—basically, pointing at stuff. Many have clearly been Photoshopped. Some are so absurd you’re tempted to laugh, if it weren’t for the risk of being scolded. In one, Kim Jong-il, dressed in a tan jumpsuit, is standing on a cliff overlooking an emerald sea, a big smile revealing cigarette-yellowed teeth, hips slightly askew in a pose inspired by a 1950s starlet.
The leaders are kept in separate rooms. They are both in glass boxes, covered in blankets and lit in faint red light. The rooms are cold. Well-dressed Koreans weep and dry their eyes with hankies. We stand in rows of four, walk slowly around the boxes, bow awkwardly on each side, and move on. Each crypt is followed by a room containing framed awards, medals, and honorary degrees, most of which come from leaders of long-gone Third World dictatorships: Pinochet, Sese Seko, Idi Amin.
We step outside into the palace’s vast courtyard. It’s drizzling and cool. “I like the rain. Washing off the crazy,” Andrew the Tupperware Man says. “That was like some crazy interactive theater.”
On the bus heading to the next must-see monument, I keep thinking about Kim Jong-il’s preserved corpse. That was weird. Kim Jong-il, he’s the despot we grew up with, the ornery bad guy in Team America: World Police. Hollywood could not have created a more perfect dictator for the outside world to mock. The tinted glasses, the bouffant, the wee pointed shoes.
But seeing with my own eyes his shriveled, blanket-covered body, looking like a sleeping raisin in a room resembling a Shanghai cocktail lounge, I felt kind of sad. Not sad for the man, but sad about the whole thing. It’s easy to laugh at North Korea, but it’s a lot tougher to understand it—the people, the history, the ideology. It’s impossible, really. I could watch a hundred North Korean movies, squirming with boredom every time, and still not get them. Because the movies speak to feelings—deep, complex feelings—that you and I will never know. And what became crystal clear as we walked through the Sun Palace is that those emotions are not funny or ironic to North Koreans. They are real, and they hurt. We could see them all in Miss P’s dampened eyes. If she was acting, she deserves an Oscar.
Our guides tell us to look nice. Tuck in your shirt, that kind of thing. Tonight’s the big night, when the prestigious Grand Prix gets awarded to the festival’s top film. The closing ceremony is back at Ponghwa theater, and the scene feels much like the opening. This time, though, there are more cameras, and they are very much focused on our gang of eight as we enter the auditorium and find our seats. We wonder if we’re going to be on North Korean TV.
Onstage are the same pooping dove and female host struggling with her English. There are speeches and performances, and I soon stop paying attention. I flip through a program and drift off thinking about how surreal and surprising the festival has been. One film from the Philippines featured a gay protagonist—this in a country where the government claims homosexuality doesn’t exist within its borders. The Judi Dench vehicle Philomena was on the program, along with shorts from Canada and Australia, a gesture toward the West that runs contrary to our prevailing assumptions about the DPRK.
In fact, while our visit has largely reinforced some North Korean stereotypes, the country itself has been, in many ways, a surprise. Foreigners can purchase 3G SIM cards for their cell phones. NGOs work here, and Christian tour grou
ps are allowed to pass through, as long as they don’t try to convert anyone. (And those three incarcerated Americans were ultimately released after negotiations with Washington.) Though the government perpetually denounces capitalist America, you can buy Coke imported from China. Pyongyang has a Viennese café and a pizza restaurant where a performer belts out “My Heart Will Go On.” I saw a boy in a Steve Nash Phoenix Suns jersey and a girl in fresh New Balance sneakers. This place isn’t as cut off from the world as the rest of us think.
This is a good thing, I muse to myself. Yes, this festival is a benevolent force, a much-needed way of bringing the world to North Korea and vice versa. Through film we can understand each other. Movies can help make the world a better place . . .
And just then a thin Swedish delegate named Henrik Nydqvist takes the stage, and all those noble ideals dissolve like vaporizer mist. Fifteen minutes before the ceremony, Nydqvist’s Korean minders had handed him sheets of paper and told him it was too late to deliver the speech he’d prepared on his own—a personal message, on behalf of all the foreign delegates, about the virtues of cultural exchange through film—which he’d been assured he could present. Instead, he must read this one:
“To your esteemed excellency, Kim Jong-un,” Nydqvist begins, addressing the absent leader, his accented words echoing throughout the auditorium. “We express our heartfelt thanks to your excellency for the meticulous care you have shown to the success of the festival from the beginning to the end . . . People admire, and will remember in their hearts, the undying exploits and greatness of your excellency, who pursues the policy of love for the people, true to the noble intention of the great generalissimos Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, the eternal suns of Juche . . .”
His speech done, Nydqvist exits the stage and we settle in for one last movie: the German film My Beautiful Country, a tale of forbidden love between a wounded Albanian soldier and a Serbian widow during Kosovo’s civil war. The story adheres to another common North Korean movie theme—the pain of separation—and thus earns My Beautiful Country the Grand Prix.
As the theater darkens, I sit next to Mr. O and watch my final movie on the North Korean big screen. It seems like a pretty good film, though I wouldn’t really know, since it’s not subtitled.
The movie isn’t meant for me, anyway. The entire festival, from beginning to end, is for the North Koreans in the theater: the soldiers, the party members, the people. The rest of us, we’re just extras.
JUSTIN NOBEL
Growing Old with the Inuit
FROM Nowhere
The flight to Cape Dorset, an Inuit community on a small island in the Canadian Arctic, was due to depart in minutes, but Inuit elders were still checking in with battered suitcases, swollen duffels, and giant black trash bags filled with frozen and bloody caribou legs. Once aboard, I snacked on Oreos and ginger ale as the turboprop plane hummed west across Baffin Island—a treeless brown expanse fractured by gleaming blue streams. Taking off in Iqaluit, capital of the vast Inuit territory of Nunavut, skies were clear, but as we approached the Hudson Strait a bright wall of clouds swallowed our plane. This foggy shield had prevented aircraft from landing in Dorset for seven days. Our pilot found a hole and down we went, skidding to a stop on the gravel runway.
Outside was an eerie Arctic world. Dark hills surrounded the town. The mountains looked like crude piles of rock, flung down by a primordial god who then stopped time, petrifying the landscape in buckles and cleaves. The waiting room was a crush of people clamoring for essentials like milk, bread, and booze, which had run dry in the fog. Royal Canadian Mounted Police in tight beige uniforms with guns strapped to their hips monitored the crowd. A banner indicated the reason I was there: WELCOME TO THE ELDERS’ GATHERING IN CAPE DORSET, AUGUST 15–19, 2011.
There is not much material out there about how different cultures once killed their elderly, a practice called senicide, but there is some. In rural Japan, upon reaching age 70, sons carried their mothers and fathers up a holy peak called Obasute-yama, or Granny-Dump Mountain, and left them on top to die of exposure and starvation. The Bactrians, who inhabited present-day northern Afghanistan, threw the old and sick to specially trained dogs called undertakers. Streets were littered with human bones. In North Africa, troglodyte elders no longer able to tend to their flocks asphyxiated themselves by fastening the tail of an ox around their necks. East of the Caspian Sea, the Derbiccae murdered males at age 70 and ate them. Women were merely strangled and buried. Among the Massagetae, who lived around the Aral Sea, relatives sacrificed old men and stewed them together with wild beasts, while the Iazyges of Sarmatia, who roamed lands north of the Black Sea, were slain by their children with swords.
Closer to home, on the rocky Diomede Islands in the storm-thrashed Bering Strait between Siberia and Alaska, the Iñupiat ritualistically murdered elders with knives, guns, and nooses. Those who wanted to die would explain their wishes to a relative, who would try to dissuade them. If minds could not be changed, the killing went forth. The person to die turned their clothing inside out, and relatives carried them on a seat of caribou skin to the destroying place at the edge of the village. The one who did the killing was called the executioner, usually the victim’s eldest son. One story, reported in a 1955 Southwestern Journal of Anthropology article, tells of a 12-year-old boy who killed his father with a large hunting knife: “He indicated the vulnerable spot over his heart, where his son should stab him. The boy plunged the knife deep, but the stroke failed to take effect. The old father suggested with dignity and resignation, ‘Try it a little higher, my son.’ The second stab was effective.”
From the Canadian Arctic comes the story of Charles Francis Hall, a Cincinnati newspaper publisher who in 1860 abandoned his wife and children to explore the frozen north. On southern Baffin Island, not far from present-day Iqaluit, he visited the igloo of a dying old woman named Nukertou, only to find the community had barricaded her home with bricks of snow. Thinking it unchristian to let her die alone, Hall forced his way in. “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven did I slowly count in the intervals of her breathing,” he wrote in his journal. “At last I could count nineteen between her inspirations but her respirations were short and prolonged—irregular. At length Nukertou ceased to live.” About 60 years later, in the early 1920s, Knud Rasmussen, an explorer and anthropologist, reported senicide among the Netsilik Inuit of King William’s Land. “For our custom up here,” he noted, “is that all old people who can do no more, and whom death will not take, help death to take them.” During long winter marches between hunting grounds, elders were left behind on ice floes to die. A decade later, the French adventurer Gontran de Poncins lived among the Netsilik and described a son who abandoned his mother in a blizzard, one of the last known accounts of senicide.
De Poncins marked the end of the explorer-anthropologist. Anthropology became a profession thereafter, with guidelines and degrees. Some questions were deemed relevant, others ridiculed. Modern anthropologists are more concerned about how things like Christianity and television and climate change affect the Inuit. Rather than being locked in igloos, Inuit elders are now confined to elder homes, which have popped up across the territory. No one thinks much about senicide, and if they think anything, they think it is a lie. “Over the last three centuries, white explorers and adventurers, police officers, missionaries, traders, and especially anthropologists, sociologists, and other scholars have spun many a twisted story about the Inuit,” wrote Canadian anthropologist John Steckley in his 2007 book White Lies About the Inuit. But when I dialed Steckley by phone at Humber College in Toronto, I was surprised to learn that he had written his entire book from the university library. The man had never been to the Arctic.
It was at about that time that my grandparents, who had traveled the world in their 70s with nothing much more than a beat-up green rucksack, staying in hostels, taking local buses, and sending me postcards from remote villages in India and China—missives that surely helped spawn my own wan
derlust—were being transferred by their sons from their rustic South Jersey home to a fancy nursing home in the suburbs of New York City. The questions of how best to deal with the aging, the inevitable frailty of the body, and the transition to death we all face seemed more important than ever. And the Inuit, at a crossroads between the violent elderly deaths of the past and the sleepy elderly deaths of the present, promised answers. Around the same time, an opportunity to investigate those answers presented itself: elderly Inuit from across Baffin Island and Nunavik, an Inuit region in Arctic Quebec where I once spent a summer reporting for the local newspaper, were meeting in Cape Dorset for an elders’ gathering. In the summer of 2011, with my grandparents safely squirreled away in their new living quarters, I returned to the Arctic.
To communicate with the elders, most of whom spoke only Inuktitut, I needed a translator. On my first night in Dorset, the mayor introduced me to just the man: Black. We chatted outside the Sam Pudlat School, where events for the elders’ gathering were to be held. Children played on swings as the sun slowly dropped. Black wore a black hoodie, black sweatpants, and black boots without laces. He had black hair that was going white and a wispy goatee that had already gone. He spoke perfect English and was sarcastic in a way one seldom sees among the Inuit, fond of phrases like “Holy Eskimo!” A sloppy tattoo on his left arm depicting a knife stabbing a rose suggested he had been to prison. I liked him immediately.
Black’s real name was Pootoogoo, which means “big toe” and is a very popular Inuit name. Of 14 kids in his elementary school class, five were named Pootoogoo. One student started calling him Black and it stuck. Black now worked as a translator when journalists and scientists came to town. He also worked as a pseudo parole officer for the police, coordinating releases when Inuit were tossed in the drunk tank. With no planes for a week, there had been no booze and the drunk tank was empty. “This is perfect for me,” said Black, lighting a cigarette. “I’ve got no work right now.”