The Propaganda Game

Film maker Álvaro Longoria managed to get permission to film inside the DPRK but it was a guided tour – that was to be expected. His tour was exclusively of the cosseted capital Pyongyang.

In recent years, a few documentary makers have entered the otherwise closed country of North Korea--some of which covertly filmed the land and its people. All of the films like these that I've seen have been rather critical of the repressive North Korean regime and its human rights violations, but this new film is a bit different.

The N. Koreans aren't only held in by a physical wall that separates them from freedom, they are held in by a wall of propaganda that hearkens to the age of the 3rd Reich.

This documentary is unlike any other documentary on the subject of North-Korea. Most documentaries have a negative undertone from the start of the beginning, but Alvaro Longoria is much more neutral in his "quest to seek out the truth".

Let's put this out of the way - everyone knows that an organised tour of the DPRK is one massive facade. For a filmmaker to gain entry and keep that much footage, the film absolutely had to showcase happy citizens, sprawling buildings and new technology.

This is an obscene movie made by a poor quality team. There are others productions from the same decade, most of them better.

With all the ongoing debacles with North Korea in the news I figured this would be a fantastic time to watch The Propaganda Game.A Spanish made documentary with very impressive and rare access to the country it pulls back the curtain (Or at least as far back as the officials would let it go) and shows both sides of this remarkable place.

The Propaganda Game is a welcome companion to Under the Sun, in which we have a cousin doc that explores the question mark that is North Korea. Asking more questions than it actually answers, one feels compelled to not only examine the North Koreans belief system but also our own which has had an unsteady philosophy of demonizing that which is contrary to our own.

In this clever documentary, Spanish filmmaker Alvaro Longoria gets rare access as a foreigner to enter North Korea and document his travels there, the notoriously secretive and isolated (both self-imposed and by the rest of the world) communist regime. Longoria's goal in visiting North Korea is to try to see first-hand for himself, and by talking directly with North Koreans, if there is any truth to the propaganda about the nation coming from NK itself and also from outside (i.