North Korea Journal

by Michael Palin

  After flying to Beijing, I met up with Nick Bonner from Koryo Tours, who was our vital liaison between London and Pyongyang and would accompany me on the trip. I hope Nick won’t mind me saying that he is just a big kid at heart, because his ability to use humour and general silliness to diffuse tensions with the North Koreans on the recce and shoot was a godsend.

  After catching the overnight train from Beijing to Pyongyang, we were greeted at the station by our North Korean guides, So Hyang and Hyon Chol, and their boss, a man known only to us as ‘Tall Li’. All three work for KITC, the Korea International Tourism Company, and together with Nick have been bringing in small groups of international visitors to North Korea for many years.

  In the weeks before the recce, Nick and I had many discussions about the locations we wanted to see and the people we hoped to meet. While I knew the capital city Pyongyang would offer up the iconic imagery of the DPRK, such as the giant statues of the Great Leaders, I also wanted Michael to experience the country as a whole. In particular, I was keen to show some of its natural beauty and when I saw photos of the stunning Mount Kumgang region and the beaches of Wonsan, thought they would be a great way of showing that there is more to North Korea than nuclear weapons and propaganda.

  Nick had sent on our ‘wish list’ to KITC, but on our first morning in Pyongyang it soon became evident that someone had reinterpreted it somewhat. I was expecting to be taken to see the metro system during the morning commute and the giant bronze statues of the Great Leaders, but instead we were driven to a very quiet random street in the centre of the city. The guides kept asking me, ‘Neil, Neil, how do you want to film this location?’ to which I had to respond that I wasn’t sure as I hadn’t known we were coming here! I then noticed they were both holding their own Korean-language versions of the schedule and when I asked what we were doing later in the week, it became obvious that theirs and mine were quite different. Not only were there no giant statues on the list, but Mount Kumgang was also nowhere to be seen.

  Sensing awkwardness, Nick suggested we sit down for a chat in one of Pyongyang’s few coffee shops. We then went through the whole schedule and tried to realign it with what had originally been planned. I am still not entirely sure why things had changed; maybe the guides considered their ideas better than mine (possibly they were right), but it was also obvious that some of our requests involved filming in ‘sensitive’ areas. Mount Kumgang, for example, is located on the west coast close to the border with South Korea, and the whole area is teeming with military installations. But I kept insisting that it was important we showed people a different side of North Korea, and after much discussion Kumgang was back on the schedule. Several coffees later, the schedule was starting to resemble what we had hoped for.

  There were, however, some areas that remained ‘no go’. We would not be allowed to visit, let alone film inside, the mausoleum where the embalmed bodies of North Korea’s former leaders Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il are on display to a constant stream of sobbing citizens, paying their respects. More worryingly, Pyongyang’s iconic Mansu Hill Grand Monument, where the two largest bronze statues of the deceased Great Leaders stand, was also off limits.

  In the past, tourists have been asked to lay flowers by the statues on the first day of their visit, bowing and paying respect to the fathers of the DPRK. Now, Tall Li told me, it was no longer ‘policy’ for visitors to pay respects with flowers, on the grounds that such a gesture might send out the idea that tourists are being forced to do something against their will. After days spent trying to persuade the guides of the importance of having the statues in the series, I was eventually allowed to visit the monument, providing I behaved myself. But it took weeks to get approval for Michael to film there and then only on the condition that he did not pay his respects with flowers.

  As the recce continued, these daily tussles with the guides continued, but the problems were often down to a lack of understanding documentary film-making, rather than political sensitivity. For example, they found it very hard to understand why, on the shoot, we would need to spend at least three hours filming most locations when a normal tourist visit would only take twenty minutes.

  One such tussle took place over my request to film at a bar. Drinking is very much part of the culture of North Korea and Nick had mentioned beer bars where locals go in the evening to spend their state-issued beer vouchers. Back in London, Michael and I often discussed how keen we were to capture everyday life and what better place to film this than in a North Korean pub? After some persuasion, Tall Li reluctantly agreed to take us by car to a local bar and that evening we drove down a dark back street, passing a fairly basic-looking building that was teeming with people, inside and out. This glimpse of slightly drunk and rowdy Koreans was so at odds with the stereotypical image of Pyongyang as a ‘weird’ city populated by repressed citizens that I couldn’t wait to go inside. But then the car kept going for another hundred yards and we stopped outside a much smaller and much more glitzy-looking establishment that was totally empty.

  I asked Tall Li why we had come here and not the other bar. ‘This is much nicer’ was his somewhat curt response, but eventually he let me walk down to the first one, to look at it from the street. Inside a neon strip-lit room were hundreds of people crowded around trestle tables, chatting amongst themselves and handing over coupons to people pulling pints at the counter. The place was teeming with life and exactly the sort of thing Michael and I wanted to capture on screen, but looking was all I could do. There was no question of me being allowed to go inside, let alone film there.

  This kept happening: we had solitary breakfasts in hotel ballrooms and dinners in empty restaurants owned by KITC. It was always easy to get a table, but meals became the dining equivalent of being sent to Siberia.

  I suspected the guides didn’t want us to see where ‘real’ North Koreans ate and drank because they thought they were too squalid for us to show on television. But the busy bars and restaurants I saw while we walked around Pyongyang looked perfectly decent, even if they were a little more basic than the tourist establishments. I began to realise that the guides just couldn’t understand why filming everyday life was so important to me; in their view it made much more sense to visit the ‘best’ places, even if they happened to have no people inside.

  After four days of this, my patience wore thin. ‘I’m trying to make a series about real life in North Korea,’ I said, ‘and you won’t let me see it. So everyone in Britain will think Pyongyang is some alien city with empty streets and empty restaurants because you won’t let us film the places people actually go to!’

  The message clearly hit home because the next night they took me to a small Korean barbecue restaurant hidden down a back street, which was bustling with life – and customers. We ended up filming there on the shoot.

  I sometimes worry that people who watch the series think that the North Koreans controlled our every move and told us what we would do every day. I won’t deny that there were heavy restrictions or that everything we filmed had to be agreed and signed off in advance, but the guides gave in to our demands more often than you might imagine. The bizarrely empty airport that Michael visited in Wonsan was off limits to me on the recce, but after much discussion we were granted permission to film there on the shoot. Using a drone camera to achieve aerial shots of Pyongyang was also dismissed out of hand to begin with, but after I’d explained how good it would make the city look, the authorities eventually relented. While there were tensions, it felt as though the guides were working with Nick and me as one team, to help make the filming go as smoothly as possible.

  Many of the challenges we faced were the day-to-day ones you might expect in a poor country such as North Korea. Outside Pyongyang, driving was not an enjoyable experience; road surfaces were uneven and potholed. I doubt we ever drove faster than twenty or thirty miles an hour, which made even short journeys into three- or four-hour low-level torture se
ssions. And once we were out in the countryside we found that the electricity supply was, at best, patchy; hotels would regularly be plunged into darkness during dinner or as we were brushing our teeth at night. The etiquette seemed to be just to carry on as though nothing had happened, even if the power cut lasted several minutes. Given that modern film cameras need powerful batteries that have to be charged overnight, we were sufficiently concerned that we ended up taking twice the number of batteries that we needed on the shoot just in case we found ourselves without power for a couple of days. In the event, we experienced barely a single power cut once we were actually filming.

  As the recce continued, the guides would ask me for every single detail of how I wanted to film each location. I was also told that I needed to present the boss of KITC with a completed schedule for the two-week shoot by the end of the trip, something that would normally be done back in London, in the intervening period between the recce and shoot. As a result, I spent most of my evenings on the recce holed up in various hotel rooms, writing a very detailed account of what we wanted to film each day, what times we would arrive and leave the various locations, who Michael wanted to meet and, very importantly, what subjects he would be discussing on camera.

  When we returned to Pyongyang after being on the road for a few days, I was marched into a hotel conference room where our guides were seated at a formal boardroom table with Tall Li and his boss, ‘Mr Mun’. The atmosphere on the recce had become very relaxed and informal, but now it was quite different. Mr Mun read me a typed statement in Korean, basically saying that he would consider the schedule I proposed and that he would let us know in a few weeks if it had been approved. He made it sound as though the chances of the filming happening were about fifty-fifty and I left the meeting full of doubt.

  It wasn’t until Michael and I had passed through North Korean customs and immigration checks on the shoot almost two months later that I knew we were good to go.

  Neil Ferguson

  Series Director