Pyongyang Diaries

In PYONGYANG DIARIES the Australian director Solrun Hoaas gives a personal account of his introduction to communist North Korea, a country he visited twice. The first time the filmmaker participated in the fourth Pyongyang Film Festival in 1994, only three months after the decease of leader Kim Il Sung. Two years later he took a fresh look at this secluded society: again as a festival guest and also as a tourist. Between the hammer and the sickle on the North Korean flag there is a painter‘s brush, symbolising the importance of art in society. Indeed, successor Kim Jong Il largely owes his image of a leader to artists. But the personality cult of the North Korean leaders with their pompous monuments, raised to suggest progress, contrast sharply with the widespread famine in the country. PYONGYANG DIARIES looks at the life behind this façade.