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WORK TITLE: Aim High in Creation!
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Sydney
STATE: NW
COUNTRY: Australia
NATIONALITY: Australian
http://aimhighincreation.com/filmmaker/ * http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1006647/ * https://www.linkedin.com/in/anna-broinowski-55b14810/ * http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35365142
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born Tokyo, Japan.
EDUCATION:University of Sydney, B.A.; Macquarie University, Ph.D., 2016; also attended National Institute of Dramatic Arts.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, screenwriter, film producer, film director, and lecturer. Freelance journalist and author, 1996-; producer and director of documentaries, series, and dramas, 2000-; lecturer to undergraduate and graduate students, 2000-. Director of documentary films, including Sexing the Label, 1996; Romancing the Chakra, 1998; and Fish & Chips (short), 2012. Also worked as a rock violinist and as an actor, including acting in the short film Lucinda, 1995, and on the television series Home and Away, 1997, and Children’s Hospital, 1998.
AWARDS:American Film Institute awards (three); Rome Film Festival “Cult” Prize; Golden Award, Al Jazeera; New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award; Moscow Film Critics’ Award; Best Non-Fiction Screenplay Award, Writer’s Guild of America.
WRITINGS
Also writer, producer, and director of the documentaries Hell Bento: Uncovering the Japanese Underground, 1995; Forbidden Lie$, 2007; Aim High in Creation!, 2013; and Please Explain, 2016. Author of the play The Gap. Contributor to periodicals, including Tokyo Journal, Cosmopolitan, Sydney Morning Herald, Australian, and Black + White.
SIDELIGHTS
Born in Tokyo, Japan, Anna Broinowski is an Australian writer and filmmaker who, as the daughter of a diplomat, grew up in the Philippines, South Korea, Vietnam, Burma, and Iran. Her documentary Hell Bento: Uncovering the Japanese Underground, released ini 1995, became a cult hit. Her documentary Forbidden Lie$ was once one of the top ten highest grossing Australian theatrical documentaries of all time.
Broinowski, who previously worked as an actor and rock violinist, is a contributor to periodicals and the author of Aim High in Creation! A One-of-a-Kind Journey inside North Korea’s Propaganda Machine, first published in Australia as The Director Is the Commander. The book, based on her documentary also titled Aim High In Creation!, recounts Broinowski’s unique story of being the only Westerner ever granted nearly full access to North Korea’s film industry, which is used by the government as a propaganda machine.
Broinowski begins Aim High in Creation! with her discovery that a gas-fracking company was planning to drill a coal seam gas well in Sydney Park. Broinowski decided she would make an anti-fracking documentary to try to stop the company’s plans. A few years earlier, a friend had given Broinowski a book she had bought in Pyongyang, the capital city of North Korea. Titled The Cinema and Directing and authored by Kim Jong-il, North Korea’s former supreme leader, the book focused on how to make the perfect propaganda film.
Broinowski initially thought little of the book, believing Kim Jong-il likely knew very little about filmmaking. However, as Broinowski wrote in an article on the British Broadcasting Corporation Website: “But as I scanned Kim’s modest tome, with its earnest exhortations to ‘aim high in creation’ and shun ‘decadent capitalist technology’ to make movies that would ‘smash imperialism’ and ‘advance the socialist cause,’ my scorn turned to grudging admiration.”
Broinowski came up with the idea of going to North Korea to learn how to make the most powerful anti-fracking movie she could. She tried for two years to gain permission to study propaganda filmmaking in North Korea when she was finally granted the opportunity to travel to Pyongyang and make her case. She was also granted full permission to film her trip, which took place six months after Kim Jong-il was succeeded by his son, Kim Jong-un. As in the documentary, the book Aim High in Creation! recounts her experience in North Korea as she worked with North Korean filmmakers and even was given a part as an American in a North Korean movie. In addition to examining the filmmaking industry in North Korea, Broinowski explores the society inside the repressive regime.
“An ingenious method of penetrating the most isolated country in the world allows an Australian filmmaker access to what proves to be a surprisingly sympathetic North Korean soul,” noted a Kirkus Reviews contributor. A reviewer writing for the Evilcyclists’ Blog believed Aim High in Creation! “may be of more interest as a film study book than to those interested in the workings of North Korea and its propaganda machine.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 2016, review of Aim High in Creation! A One-of-a-Kind Journey inside North Korea’s Propaganda Machine.
ONLINE
Aim High in Creation! Website, http://aimhighincreation.com/ (June 20, 2017), author profile.
Anna Broinowski LinkedIn Website, https://www.linkedin.com/in/anna-broinowski-55b14810 (June 20, 2017).
British Broadcasting Corporation Web site, http://www.bbc.com/ (January 21 2016), Anna Broinowski, “The Australian Who Shot a North Korean Propaganda Film.”
Evilcyclist’s Blog, https://evilcyclist.wordpress.com/ (October 22, 2016), review of Aim High in Creation!
IMDb, http://www.imdb.com/ (June 20, 2017), author filmography.
The Australian who shot a North Korean propaganda film
21 January 2016
From the section Magazine These are external links and will open in a new window Share this with Facebook Share this with Twitter Share this with Messenger Share this with Email Share
North Korea Film set
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Last September Australian film-maker Anna Broinowski went to South Korea to screen a film she shot partly in North Korea, working alongside Pyongyang's leading film directors. Here she describes her surreal experiences inside the North Korean propaganda machine, the friends she made there, and the reaction of viewers in the South to her movie.
Bicycling along the demilitarised zone (DMZ) in the South Korean town of Paju a few months ago, I was struck by two things:
How beautiful the most heavily militarised border on Earth is, when you forget that its 250km-long swathe of forests is laced with landmines
How three years had passed since I stood on the North Korean side of the wire, looking back at Paju, though it still felt like yesterday
In 2012, six months after Kim Jong-un succeeded his father Kim Jong-il as leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, I shot a film in North Korea.
I was armed with a media visa and the backing of the regime - the only Western documentary-maker granted total access to the country's hidden, but extremely powerful, propaganda film industry.
Film making mural
This surreal honour had taken me two years to achieve. It was inspired by a joke birthday present: a copy of Kim Jong-il's 1987 propaganda manifesto, The Cinema and Directing. A journalist friend had picked up the book in Pyongyang while conducting an undercover investigation into North Korea's human rights abuses.
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My first response to the gift was ridicule. According to Western newsfeeds, the Dear Leader was a platform-heeled, bouffant-haired dictator, who starved his people, stocked his palaces with Hennessy and "joy division" babes, and repeatedly threatened to nuke America. What could he possibly know about film-making?
But as I scanned Kim's modest tome, with its earnest exhortations to "aim high in creation" and shun "decadent capitalist technology" to make movies that would "smash imperialism" and "advance the socialist cause", my scorn turned to grudging admiration.
Kim Jong Il gives advice at the shooting of Image copyrightAP
Kim may have been a ruthless dictator, but he was a gifted cineaste. His genius for mass-manipulation was backed by an encyclopaedic knowledge of cinema. According to Shin Sang-ok - the South Korean director Kim allegedly kidnapped in 1978 to elevate North Korean movies to world-class standard - the dictator kept 20,000 foreign films in a secret vault in Pyongyang (Elizabeth Taylor and the Bond franchise were particular favourites), and successfully adapted Hollywood techniques to transform the regime's dour, Soviet-style epics into the multi-genre smorgasbord of rom-coms, noir thrillers and military shoot-em-ups that 24 million North Koreans watch today.
Kim ghost-directed many movies between 1964 and his death in 2011. The god-like image he'd built for himself meant he couldn't take public credit, in case one of them flopped. More than one film-maker who failed to please the Dear Leader found himself in a "re-education camp". The artistic bastard child of Leni Riefenstahl and Steven Spielberg, Kim's tastes were Western, but his end-game was propaganda - his films are as diverse as they are ideologically myopic. The ruddy-cheeked heroines driving his socialist blockbusters - from the 1969 melodrama, Sea of Blood, to the frothy 2006 teen-comedy, Schoolgirl's Diary - are never in any doubt that they live in the greatest country, under the greatest leader, on Earth.
Find out more
Anna Broinowski in North Korea
Listen to Making Movies in North Korea, which was originally broadcast on Outlook, by the BBC World Service
The adventures Broinowski shared with North Korean film directors are captured in her 2013 documentary, Aim High in Creation!
The things she wasn't allowed to film are documented in her 2015 book, The Director is the Commander
Fascinated by Kim's overt hatred of the West and covert love of Hollywood, and intrigued by his counter-intuitive film rules, I enlisted some actors in a bizarre experiment - we would make a propaganda film in Kim Jong-il's style. I knew we needed a capitalist enemy (the multinational company planning to drill for gas near my inner-city Sydney home was perfect), a working-class heroine, and an army of downtrodden villagers to rise up in glorious unison against the dastardly frackers.
What I didn't know was that thanks to some timely support from Beijing-based British film-maker and North Korea-tour operator Nick Bonner, I would end up making my movie in collaboration with Kim Jong-il's top film-makers.
Passionate, generous, frank, intelligent, proud and extremely curious about the world I'd come from, the North Korean directors, actors, musicians, stunt fighters, tour guides and artists I met contradicted the dehumanising, simplistic view we're often fed of North Koreans - a view that typically depicts them as brainwashed or fearful colluders, conflating them with the brutal regime under which, through no fault of their own, they happen to live.
Anna with North Korean film-makers
Within two hours of arriving in Pyongyang - an eerily serene city, with pastel-coloured buildings, colour-co-ordinated pedestrians, hand-painted murals and a total absence of advertising - I found myself at a barbecue with my new North Korean friends. We were sitting in a paddock ringed by fake Swiss chalets and goats - the "European" part of four massive outdoor film sets Kim built in the 1970s so his film-makers would not need to travel - or, one assumes, defect.
In their matching floral barbecue aprons, the film-makers had an old-world innocence, like extras in an MGM musical - which is perhaps understandable, in a culture that has been completely sealed off from the internet, reality TV, crack cocaine, violent gaming, selfies, rock, pop, fast food, 3D, Twitter, viral marketing and every other consumerist fad that has distracted the free world since 1945.
Less expected was the irreverent humour of my North Korean colleagues. After many alcohol-fuelled toasts to the "future friendship" between our two nations, Pyongyang's top action director ripped off his shirt and leapt to his feet, bellowing a song of comradely love with tears in his eyes. A popular rom-com writer then brought the house down with an anti-Soviet joke that involved the South Korean president, David Beckham and George W Bush being boiled alive by cannibals.
North Korean film-makers view the short film
Image caption
North Korean film-makers view Anna's short film
I was convinced the enthusiastic singing and jokey camaraderie had been staged, Truman-Show-style, for my benefit. But a week later, picnicking with my North Korean minders on Moran Hill, a park in central Pyongyang, I peered over the hedges to discover 15 people of all ages dancing joyfully to a folk tune, blasted by a grandmother on a 1980s boom box. There is no way these people could have known we were there.
I did have a few rare glimpses of North Korea's dark side during my 24 days in the country, despite my minders' determination to keep my glasses rose-tinted. Installed on the "foreigners' floor" at the top of the Yangakkdo hotel (a 90s-era skyscraper with a casino, karaoke bar, massage parlour, snooker room and bowling alley mysteriously concealed in its basement), I was sure my room was bugged. One night at 2am, during a marathon binge on propaganda films that had been thoughtfully curated for me by the state agency, Korfilm, I couldn't help laughing. The randomness with which North Korean actors burst into songs about the Dear Leader - whether they are on a battlefield, in jail, or shovelling manure in a field - is absurd, and I was fed up with the reverence with which I was expected to greet every mention of the Kims. The phone rang immediately. My minder's irritation was palpable: "Anna, please watch the films."
Pyongyang film studios
Image caption
A portrait of Kim Il-sung watches over Pyongyang film studios
In Pyongyang's pristine streets, I was never allowed to film the ubiquitous statues of the Kims at any angle other than front-on (tourists who have disobeyed this directive have been sent back to China) and while most passers-by I encountered in our tightly controlled excursions seemed fairly well-nourished - the people living in Pyongyang are, by all reports, the lucky ones - I once saw two dehydrated puppies strung by their necks to a bicycle. They did not look like pets.
True to its word, Korfilm did allow my camera inside almost every facet of the film industry. From a military thriller being shot on the captured American spy ship the USS Pueblo to the April 25th Military Film Studio and Pyongyang Film Studio - with its wall chart commemorating the 11,870 times Kim visited film sets to give "on the spot guidance" - to a state-of-the-art concert hall, where a black-tie orchestra performed a melancholy song composed by People's Artist Pei Young Sam for my documentary.
Media captionA visit to a film set in North Korea
I was, however, banned from the telecine labs. Despite my reassurance that celluloid is now as cool as vinyl in the digital West, my minders feared that shots of spooling film stock would make North Korean film-makers, who still shoot on 35mm German Arri cameras with non-sync sound, look primitive.
North Korea's notorious "million-man army" was also off limits. When a cavalcade of rusting 1950s-era jeeps packed with bewildered teenagers in plastic-buttoned uniforms thundered past a traffic lady in Pyongyang one afternoon, my minder slammed our viewfinder shut with his fist. The customs official who later examined my footage complained there were "too many soldiers" in my exteriors. But as my minder reasonably pointed out, there are "soldiers everywhere" in Pyongyang, and some cannot be avoided.
The official was also unhappy that one of the directors spoke "too positively" of The Godfather, and didn't like the way that Kim's face, beaming on a badge pinned to an actress's lapel, had been obscured by my radio-mic wire. I assured him we'd paint it out in post-production, and left the country with my footage intact.
Three years later, the images I shot in North Korea are still clear in my mind:
My gracious 70-year-old mentor, Mr Pak, hobbling over a barbed-wire-strewn wasteland after curfew in his neatly pressed chinos, to the lightless shack he called home
My 22-year-old interpreter in her tight white denim - eyes wide with delight as she grabbed my Kim Kardashian perfume, marvelling that Westerners use a cologne "named after our Dear Leader"
The blonde, blue-eyed Dresnok boys - staring at me with undisguised hatred on the USS Pueblo, where they were playing "Yankee bastards" in my cameo scene as an "evil American wife"
The sons of Joe Dresnok - a US GI who wandered over the DMZ in the 1960s hoping to get to Russia and was instead typecast by Kim Jong-il as North Korea's number one movie villain - the Dresnok boys are North Korean born and bred. I kept fluffing my lines, which is a grave mistake in North Korea - film stock is precious, and actors get 1.5 takes per scene. When I got the sack, the Dresnoks couldn't hide their joy.
Image from Aim High
In September 2015, the 70th anniversary of the division of Korea, my documentary Aim High in Creation! screened in a special programme at the DMZ docs festival in Paju.
South Koreans are prevented by law from watching North Korean films, so the snippets of North Korean life captured in my film and in a handful of other foreign documentaries shown at the festival, represented the full extent to which audiences could cross the "mental DMZ" that still exists, I am told, inside the heart of every Korean.
The warmth with which the South Koreans greeted the North Koreans in Aim High!, and the astonishment with which they responded to its images of ordinary people going about their lives - images which the South Korean government would normally never let them see - was extraordinary.
I left Paju struck by the tragedy of this divided country, in which politicians on both sides have a vested interest in keeping people ignorant about their cousins on the other side of the wire.
Aim High! is not a perfect film - its combination of a Kim Jong-il propaganda short within a "straight" anti-gas documentary is undeniably odd. But having now shown it in South Korea, I am glad we made it. In a media environment that seems intent on portraying North Koreans as nothing more than the sub-human puppets of an unremittingly evil regime, the people we meet in Aim High! are three-dimensional, likeable and human.
Our similarities outweigh our differences.
As my mentor, Mr Pak, said to me on our last night together: "Film-makers are family."
More from the Magazine
Shin Sang-okImage copyrightAP
It sounds more far-fetched than anything a film-maker could invent - the story of how a director and a leading actress were kidnapped by North Korea and forced to make films for the state's movie-mad leader, Kim Jong-il.
Kidnapped by North Korea - and forced to make films
Photographs, unless otherwise indicated, provided by Anna Broinowski
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Anna Broinowski
Filmmaker, Author, Lecturer
Journalist, Author Macquarie University
Sydney, Australia 500+ 500+ connections
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Anna Broinowski is an international award-winning filmmaker, author and lecturer who loves capturing the illicit. Her adventures have taken her from Japan's Otaku subculture, to Arizona Armageddon cults, to the propaganda filmmakers of North Korea. Her first book, "The Director is the Commander" (Penguin 2015), about North Korea's film industry, is out in the USA as "Aim High in Creation!"
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Experience
Journalist, Author
Journalist and Author: politics, human interest, nonfiction
Company NameJournalist, Author
Dates EmployedJan 1996 – Present Employment Duration21 yrs 6 mos
Locationvarious
Producer/Director
Producer/Director: documentary, series, drama
Company NameProducer/Director
Dates EmployedJan 1995 – Present Employment Duration22 yrs 6 mos
Locationinternational
Lecturer
Lecturer - undergrad and postgrad, specialising in documentary, propaganda, nonfiction
Company NameLecturer
Dates EmployedJan 2000 – Present Employment Duration17 yrs 6 mos
LocationAFTRS, UTS, MACQUARIE, RMIT, YALE, SIFS
Writer/Producer/Director
PAULINE HANSON: PLEASE EXPLAIN
Company NameWriter/Producer/Director
Dates EmployedJan 2015 – Jul 2016 Employment Duration1 yr 7 mos
SBS feature documentary (aired July 31 2016) on newly minted Senator Pauline Hanson's impact on multicultural Australia in the 1990s.
Writer
The Director is the Commander
Company NameWriter
Dates Employed2014 – 2015 Employment Duration1 yr
Book
Director/Writer/Producer
Aim High in Creation!
Company NameDirector/Writer/Producer
Dates EmployedJan 2011 – 2013 Employment Duration2 yrs
ABC/NETFLIX USA feature documentary
Director/Writer/Producer
Forbidden Lie$
Company NameDirector/Writer/Producer
Dates Employed2007 – 2009 Employment Duration2 yrs
Palace/SBS feature documentary
Director/Writer
Helen's War
Company NameDirector/Writer
Dates Employed2003 – 2004 Employment Duration1 yr
SBS/ZDF/CBC one-off documentary
Director/Producer
Sexing the Label
Company NameDirector/Producer
Dates Employed1996 – 1997 Employment Duration1 yr
Director/Producer
Hell Bento!!
Company NameDirector/Producer
Dates Employed1995 – 1996 Employment Duration1 yr
Writer
The Gap
Company NameWriter
Dates Employed1994 – 1995 Employment Duration1 yr
Education
Macquarie University
Macquarie University
Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Field Of Study Mass Communication/Media Studies
My PHD, awarded 2016, is about the use of deceptive techniques in documentary cinema from its inception to the present day - with a focus on persuasion, illusion and propaganda.
National Institute of Dramatic Arts
National Institute of Dramatic Arts
Acting
University of Sydney
University of Sydney
Arts Law degree (completed BA)
Anna Broinowski
Biography
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Mini Bio (1)
Anna Broinowski is a director and writer, known for Forbidden Lie$ (2007), Helen's War (2004) and Aim High in Creation (2013).
Filmography
Jump to: Director | Writer | Actress | Producer | Camera and Electrical Department | Thanks | Self
Hide HideDirector (8 credits)
2016 Pauline Hanson: Please Explain! (TV Movie documentary)
2013 Aim High in Creation (Documentary)
2012 Fish & Chips (Short)
2007 Forbidden Lie$ (Documentary)
2004 Helen's War (TV Movie documentary)
1998 Romancing the Chakra (Documentary)
1996 Sexing the Label (Documentary)
1995 Hell Bento: Uncovering the Japanese Underground (Documentary)
Hide Hide Writer (6 credits)
2016 Pauline Hanson: Please Explain! (TV Movie documentary)
2013 Aim High in Creation (Documentary) (writer)
2012 Fish & Chips (Short)
2007 Forbidden Lie$ (Documentary)
2004 Helen's War (TV Movie documentary) (written by)
1995 Hell Bento: Uncovering the Japanese Underground (Documentary)
Hide Hide Actress (3 credits)
1998 Children's Hospital (TV Series)
Ann Carter
- Safety in Numbers (1998) ... Ann Carter
1997 Home and Away (TV Series)
Karen Williams
- Episode #1.2236 (1997) ... Karen Williams
- Episode #1.2234 (1997) ... Karen Williams
1995 Lucinda, 31 (Short)
Vanessa
Hide Hide Producer (4 credits)
2016 Pauline Hanson: Please Explain! (TV Movie documentary) (producer)
2013 Aim High in Creation (Documentary) (producer)
2007 Forbidden Lie$ (Documentary) (producer)
1995 Hell Bento: Uncovering the Japanese Underground (Documentary) (producer)
Hide Hide Camera and Electrical Department (2 credits)
2013 Aim High in Creation (Documentary) (additional camera)
1995 Hell Bento: Uncovering the Japanese Underground (Documentary) (additional camera)
Hide Hide Thanks (2 credits)
2011 General Dang (Documentary short) (special thanks)
2003 Ward 13 (Short) (thanks)
Hide Hide Self (2 credits)
2015 Àrtic (TV Series)
Herself
- Episode #2.158 (2015) ... Herself
2012 The Guy Who Killed Paris Hilton (Video documentary)
Herself
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Did You Know?
Trivia: She graduated from Australia's National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) with a degree in Performing Arts (Acting) in 1990.
FILMMAKER
78.-Anna-Broinowksi-on-deck-web
Writer and Director Anna Broinowski
Filmmaker
Anna Broinowski fell into filmmaking by accident – when she uncovered Japan’s queer, bikie and Otaku subcultures in cult hit, HELL BENTO!! She’s been working as a director/writer/producer ever since.
Her last film, FORBIDDEN LIE$, about hoax author Norma Khouri, was one of the top ten highest grossing Australian theatrical docs of all time.
Other films include HELEN’S WAR, ROMANCING THE CHAKRA and SEXING THE LABEL. They won some stuff, including 3 AFIs, the Rome Film Festival ‘Cult’ Prize, a Walkley Award, Best Doc at Al Jazeera, a NSW Premier’s Literary award, a Moscow Film Critics’ Award, Best Director at Films Des Femmes, and Best non-fiction Screenplay from the Writer’s Guild of America.
Before filmmaking, Anna was an actor, writer and rock violinist. She toured her bilingual play THE GAP to Japan, and wrote for Tokyo Journal, Cosmopolitan, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, Black + White Magazine and others.
Anna was born in Tokyo and grew up in the Philippines, South Korea, Vietnam, Burma and Iran. This has given her a passion for exploding western cliches about the East.
DRINKING THE KOOLAID, Anna’s book about her adventures in North Korea, will be published by Penguin in 2014.
12.-Anna-Broinowski-reading-Kim-Jong-Ils-book-on-directing-2-web
Director’s Statement
A few years back, a friend gave me a discreet, leather-bound book she’d bought in Pyongyang: Kim Jong Il’s “The Cinema and Directing”. I was fascinated by the Dear Leader’s detailed (and often counter-intuitive) instructions on how to make the Perfect Propaganda Film – and by the conflict between his mission to destroy capitalism on screen, and his love of western cinema.
Kim Jong Il was passionate about movies – in particular Hollywood ones. As ‘Creative Commander’ of North Korea’s film industry from 1964 to 2011, he restyled himself as an Eastern Bloc Spielberg:- upgrading the dour propaganda films he hated by adapting western film genres and techniques. He gave ‘on-the-spot creative guidance’ to his filmmakers exactly 11,870 times. But he never took a direct credit.
Kim Jong Il may have been inspired by Hollywood, but he rejected it in public. As he says in his Manifesto: “In a capitalist society the director is shackled by the government policy of commercialising the cinema, so that he is a mere worker who obeys the filmmaking industrialists whether he likes it or not. On the other hand, in the socialist society the director is an independent artist who is responsible to the people. He is Creative Commander of everything – from the film itself to the ideological life of those who take part in it.”
It is this quote that first gave me the idea of making a film based on Kim Jong Il’s Manifesto. A convert to dramatised docs after making FORBIDDEN LIE$, and inspired by Lars Von Trier’s THE 5 OBSTRUCTIONS, along with ‘misfits-on-a-mission’ fiction films like LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE, I decided to make a film about a bunch of western actors who follow Kim Jong Il’s rules to produce a propaganda short. The result is AIM HIGH IN CREATION! – a drama-doc hybrid about ideology, the environment and the manipulative power of Cinema.
The meta-focus of AIM HIGH! is Propaganda – both good and bad, both highly sophisticated (as seen in the corporate West) and didactic (as seen in North Korea). The dramatic story is about one fanatical director and five brave actors who decide Kim Jong Il’s propaganda techniques are powerful enough to stop a Sydney gas mine. Will they or won’t they stop the mine? is the hook around which the film was originally structured. But once I went to North Korea and experienced the generosity, warmth, candour and passion with which Kim Jong Il’s top filmmakers embraced our cause, I realised that the main message in AIM HIGH! is that no matter where you live, and no matter what ideological framework you operate within, Filmmakers are Family.
The North Korean sequences in AIM HIGH! focus almost exclusively on North Korean filmmaking, and only touch obliquely on the Regime. I have done this deliberately, because I believe it is time a new story about North Korea was told: a story that explores, through the prism of cinema, the common humanity of the 23 million North Koreans who are not living in the nation’s well-documented Gulags.
The North Koreans who I discovered were resilient, funny, smart, tough and curiously naive: a people untainted by the materialism that has besieged the world since North Korea shut itself off from it in 1953. A people still locked in a more innocent mindset when it comes to entertainment: with movies, family picnics, story telling, funfairs and group singing being the top ways of having fun. And yes, it was news to me too that you can actually have fun in North Korea!
Stylistically, AIM HIGH! is multi-faceted. The ‘making-of’ scenes with the Australian actors and farmers are naturalistic. The segments about Kim Jong Il’s film legacy reflect his own propaganda docs, with didactic voice-over, bold graphics, formal interviews, and lush 35mm North Korean film archive. The third layer is our Kim Jong Il-style Propaganda drama, which is a homage to all that is wonderful and bizarre about North Korean cinema. Shot on the Arri Alexa by Geoffrey Simpson (SHINE), it features an orchestral song by Kim Jong Il’s favourite composer Pae Young Sam, an unashamedly melodramatic acting style, symbolic design, old-fashioned crash zooms, and a didactic plot in which ‘heroic’ workers battle the ‘capitalist swine’ of Needle Energy: a gas company hell bent on drilling in Sydney Park.
Thematically, AIM HIGH! smashes clichés about North Korea in unexpected ways, using humour to unite audiences regardless of their beliefs. Using my laptop as a default Skype device (North Koreans do not have access to outside phones or email), I play the North Korean filmmakers my Actors’ questions, and vice versa, to ignite a genuine creative collaboration. Despite their almost religious belief in the Dear Leader’s cinematic genius, Directors Ri Kwan Am and Pak Jong Ju, Actress Yun Su Gyong and DOP O Teh Young are all charming, candid, fascinating people who I (and I hope, the audience) cannot help but like.
Politically, I am fascinated by the contrast of planting Kim Jong Il’s socialist film rules in the middle of materialistic Sydney, at the same time that anti-corporate protests have erupted around the world to create the impression that capitalism is, as Kim Jong Il predicted, in its dying days. Of course, it isn’t: the Coal Seam Gas industry’s global proliferation, unfettered by environmental controls, is free-market capitalism at its venal best: and the perfect subject for our short. It pits “oppressors” against the “oppressed” – whom it is our solemn duty, as filmmakers in Kim Jong Il’s mould, “to convert to the revolutionary cause.”
Kim Jong Il is known as a Dictator in the West. But his unique contribution to cinema has been almost totally overlooked. De Palma has paid homage to Hitchcock, and Tarantino has paid homage to everyone from Pekinpah to John Woo. I believe it’s time we paid homage to Kim Jong Il the filmmaker. In fact, I’m surprised no-one has done it until now.
AIM HIGH! is a piece of entertainment, but it has also been made to move and inspire audiences – no matter what their political beliefs. In using the universal language of Cinema to break down the East/West divide, I passionately hope that AIM HIGH! creates a new understanding: between the hidden filmmakers of North Korea, and viewers around the world.
Alison Broinowski
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This biographical article is written like a résumé. Please help improve it by revising it to be neutral and encyclopedic. (June 2014)
Alison W. Broinowski
Born Alison Woodroffe
25 October 1941 (age 75)
Adelaide, South Australia
Nationality Australian
Alma mater Adelaide University
Occupation Academic, journalist, writer
Political party The Wikileaks Party
Spouse(s) Richard Broinowski (married 1963)
Dr. Alison W. Broinowski (born 25 October 1941) is an Australian academic, journalist, writer and former Australian public servant.
Her maiden name was Woodroffe; born in Adelaide, she attended from 1946 to 1958 the Wilderness School in that city, and in 1962 she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from Adelaide University. In December of the following year, she married Richard Philip Broinowski. From 1963-64 she was a cadet for the Australian Department of External Affairs before beginning her extensive public service career, including various diplomatic postings, with the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFAT).
In July 2013 Broinowski announced her intention to run as The Wikileaks Party in New South Wales Senate candidate for at the 2013 Australian federal election.[1]
Contents [hide]
1 Career
2 Bibliography
2.1 Book reviews
3 References
4 External links
Career[edit]
1965-68 - Freelance journalist in Japan
1969 - Journalist and leader-writer for the Canberra Times
1970-74 - Department of Foreign Affairs, Japan Section
1975-78 - Second Secretary at the Australian Embassy in Manila, Philippines
1978-82 - ASEAN Section, Department of Foreign Affairs; Co-ordinator, Australian Institute of International Affairs Conferences
1982-83 - Administrative Assistant to the Governor General; Executive Director of the Australian National Word Festival
1983-85 - Cultural Counsellor at the Australian Embassy in Tokyo, Japan
1986 - Director, Japan Section, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade
1987-88 - Director, Australia-Japan Foundation, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade; Visiting Fellow at the Department of Asian Studies, Australian National University
1988 - Chargé d'Affaires with the Australian Embassy in Amman, Jordan, and Research Associate with the Korean Research Foundation and Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea
1989-90 - Counsellor with the Australian Mission to the United Nations in New York City, United States
1990-92 - On leave from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to undertake freelance work, including lecturing, journalism, broadcasting and research on Australia/Asian affairs
1992-93 - Regional Director with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in Melbourne
1993-94 - Director, Advocacy and Planning, Australia Council
1995 - Visiting Fellow, Australian Defence Force Academy
1995-96 - Research Associate, Ibero American University, Mexico
1996 - Visiting Fellow, University of Canberra
1996-99 - Visiting Fellow, Australian National University
Bibliography[edit]
This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.
Broinowski, Alison (1992). The yellow lady : Australian impressions of Asia. Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
— (1996). The yellow lady : Australian impressions of Asia. 2nd ed. Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
— (2003). About face : Asian accounts of Australia. Melbourne: Scribe Publications.
2003: "Howard's War" (Scribe Publications; ISBN 0 908011-99-7
2005: with James Wilkinson, "The Third Try: can the UN work?" (Scribe Publications)
2007: "Allied and Addicted" (Scribe Publications)
2007: as editor, "Double Vision: Asian Accounts of Australia" (Pandanus Books)
— (Mar 2016). "A long journey on the ikebana road". The National Library of Australia Magazine. 8 (1): 20–23.
Book reviews[edit]
Date Review article Work(s) reviewed
2011 Broinowski, Alison (June 2011). "Runaway Presidency". Australian Book Review. 332: 65–66. Ackerman, Bruce (2010). The decline and fall of the American republic. Harvard University Press.
2013 Broinowski, Alison (April 2013). "Unsanitised history : past wars don't end all wars". Australian Book Review. 350: 15–16. Stone, Oliver; Kuznick, Peter (2012). The untold history of the United States. Ebury Press.
Anna Broinowski: AIM HIGH IN CREATION!
Kirkus Reviews. (Sept. 15, 2016):
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Anna Broinowski AIM HIGH IN CREATION! Arcade (Adult Nonfiction) 27.99 11, 1 ISBN: 978-1-62872-676-3
An ingenious method of penetrating the most isolated country in the world allows an Australian filmmaker access to what proves to be a surprisingly sympathetic North Korean soul.In 2012, Sydney-based Broinowski was invited to make a short film with Kim Jong II’s top filmmakers by wildly convoluted means. She came upon a book that the North Korean dictator (who died in 2011) had written about cinema and directing and learned how this son of Kim Il Sung had revolutionized the country’s film industry by shifting the propaganda focus “from dry, Soviet-style epics extolling the virtues of communism to full-blown celebrations of the heavenly supremacy” of his father. Kim managed to do this by kidnapping the famous South Korean filmmaker Shin Sang-ok and his movie star wife, Choi Eun-hee, in the late 1970s and turning out such classics as Pulgasari. The author was faced with a David-and-Goliath theme, much extolled by Kim, in her own backyard, as it were, in trying to save the neighborhood Sydney Park from coal seam gas drilling by the dark-sounding company Dart Energy. By harnessing the filmmaking ideas of Kim to the “ideologically pure” theme of saving the children’s playground from the capitalists, she hit on a perfect way of winning over the North Koreans. Her way of entree, however, takes up half the book, including time and numerous handlers and lots of cash, while the severely censored tours in Pyongyang are fairly well-documented elsewhere. What is startling in this book is Broinowski’s exploration inside the massively powerful propaganda factory of the Pyongyang Film Studio, where the author met the famous, now aging actors, composers, and cineastes of Kim’s reign—e.g., the exacting director Mr. Pak (the “North Korean Scorsese—known for searing political thrillers”), who became her mentor. Experiencing North Korean “method acting” in the most visceral way.
OCTOBER 22, 2016 · 11:55 ↓ Jump to Comments
Book Review — Aim High in Creation!: A One-of-a-Kind Journey inside North Korea’s Propaganda Machine
Aim High in Creation! by Anna Broinowski
Aim High in Creation!: A One-of-a-Kind Journey inside North Korea’s Propaganda Machine by Anna Broinowski is an Australian filmmaker’s experience in North Korea. Broinowski fell into filmmaking by accident – when she uncovered Japan’s queer, bikie, and Otaku subcultures in cult hit, HELL BENTO!! She’s been working as a director/writer/producer ever since. Her last film, FORBIDDEN LIE$, about hoax author Norma Khouri, was one of the top ten highest grossing Australian theatrical docs of all time. She was born in Tokyo and grew up traveling across Asia as a daughter of an Austrailian diplomat.
I have read several scholarly books on North Korea over the years and over time the information begins to repeat. There is a limited knowledge of what goes on in North Korea and, for that matter, what has happened in the past. North Korea is unique among nations. The US and Cuba had been enemies for years and both countries political systems fed off the mistrust and hate. But, in Cuba, many still know and remember capitalism. North Korea is closed off to such an extent that the people there believe they are the second wealthiest country in the world trailing only China. Aid from the West particularly from the US is passed out as war reparations from the vanquished Americans. Kim Il-Sung was a child of missionary trained protestants, a background he used to create his own state religion with himself as the savior. His son Kim Jung-Il was a talented cinematographer and propagandist. North Korea is a country controlled by its government’s ability to entrap its population in a perverse Disney-like “reality.” Those who look behind the curtain are sent to prison camps.
My first thoughts were this is going to be an excellent book. Here is a Westerner allowed into the propaganda center of the country and this will be interesting and possibly enlightening. Broinowski starts her story with coal seam fracking in her hometown and decides to fight the corporate propaganda by making a movie about it. She turns to the North Korean professionals to help her make the movie. Despite difficulties, she gets a visa and permission to meet and work with leaders in the North Korean movie/propaganda industry. There is praise and discussion of Kim Jung-Il’s cinematography methods and earning the trust of her North Korean minder and the directors. There is a bond that develops between the author and the North Korean professionals. They help Broinowski make her anti-fracking film in North Korean style.
In reading the preview for the book, I noticed it was made into a Netflix movie. I started the movie and found it to be more of a slapstick mockery than a serious look at the North Korean propaganda machine. The book, however, offers a few good points and bits of new information. One point that is left out is that although North Korean directors have a free hand in their movie making and do not have to listen to investors and sponsors, there is little doubt what would happen to a filmmaker who made a movie that was unfavorable to the regime. Broinowski had great potential to do some serious work in an area of North Korea that has not been opened to the West. Instead, I found her book to be light. My background is political science and as mentioned I have read quite a bit on North Korea. This book may be of more interest as a film study book than to those interested in the workings of North Korea and its propaganda machine.