North Korea shouldn’t be boycotted but embraced- at least that’s what Nick Bonner says after nearly two decades of leading groups around the country through his business, Koryo Tours, coaxing British football teams towards tournaments in the dictatorship’s borders, and shooting documentaries about The Hermit Kingdom’s everyday locals. Bonner will be screening the finest example of the latter tonight at 7:30 p.m. at the Bookworm in Sanlitun. Tickets are ¥50. The film is a segment of the Canadian travel program “Departures,” for which he helped the film crew gain unprecedented access to the enigmatic DPRK.
[For more background on the current state of North Korea, check out the latest Sinica podcast with three journalists recently returned from the "hermit kingdom"]
What kind of challenges are involved in making these movies? We’ve done lots of docs about North Korea, none of them were easy. There’s this Belgium film fund that not only disapproved of a romantic comedy we’re working on (shot on location there), but called the movie sympathetic propaganda and pulled their funding at the last minute.
What sets your films apart from others about North Korea? The “Departures” doc tries to be objective. [In other documentaries] you’ll get shots of people picking grass. Then it’s portrayed that they’re eating it, when in fact they’re taking it to feed their rabbit. Basically things like that. Reporters and photographers are going into North Korea for a week, and it’s just too much of a sensory experience for them to really understand what they’re looking at... it makes for inaccurate reporting.
Obviously there’s been a lot of coverage on North Korea’s problems- the aggressions with the South, poverty that’s apparently hidden from foreign correspondents and tourists, even a recent Newsweek story about a budding methamphetamine pandemic at their border with China. Are we only getting one side of the story? What kind of positive things have you seen there? Pyongyang is one of the most beautiful cites in Asia. It has two beautiful rivers, wild architecture. They have more green space, no traffic jams. So there’s a lot to actually learn from them as a city- if you take away the government system and just look at the surface.
What first prompted you to visit North Korea? I came to China as a landscape architect in the late 1980s and made a North Korean friend in Beijing. After I went I realized people needed to see it for themselves, so I decided to set up Koryo Tours because that was the only way to get visas to North Korea, and then slowly the tours started working and we ended up in this situation now. For 20 years we have been there almost every month setting up tours and events, trying to engage them.
As a landscape architect, what amazed you about North Korea? The buildings go from a Russian brutalist sort of style right through to the Ryugyong Hotel, the ice skating rink, and The May Day Stadium- which all have this surreal futuristic dream quality, like out of Blade Runner.
What needs to change in North Korea? I’m not going around prophesying about how it needs to change because the best thing about the Departures film is its objectivity. What I do believe is the west has to change its attitudes about North Korea and start engaging like we did with China. You only need to look around Asia to see where engagement has worked for Western relations. Then there are places like Burma, where we haven’t engaged. Because when you don’t engage, what do you expect will change?