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Scanning Good Friends North Korea Today No. 404 it hit me that these stories had real cinematic possibilities. Some Hallyu remake possibilities:
New Jack City (1991). Ice-T begins his transition from being the scourge of cops to playing on TV; Wesley Snipes plays a criminal in the movies before becoming one in real life; Chris Rock as a crackhead. In the North Korean remake, the drugs aren’t cooked up in an underground Harlem lab; they’re made by university medical students and instead of being sold to destitute ghetto-dwellers, they’re sold to judges and party cadres. NB: One recent visitor to North Korea reports stumbling upon drug paraphernalia in a public park, as well as coming across posters at a provincial university warning against possession of illegal drugs, specifying several barbiturates by name. What does it mean when a society’s recreational drug of choice is a downer?
The Bicycle Thief (1948). Vittorio De Sica’s neo-realist masterpiece must be one of the saddest films in cinematic history. In the North Korean version, a poor Sinuiju bicycle repairman, devastated by the catastrophic November 2009 currency reform, is pressured by soldiers to remodel bicycles that they had stolen. When the soldiers’ ring is busted, the repairman is caught in the sweep. The movie ends with the repairman’s young son watching forlornly as his father is dragged off to a re-education center. NB: OK, I added that last detail which is not in the Good Friends report.
Pigs and Battleships (1961). Inamura Shohei’s black comedy may be the least well-known of the line-up, but his tale of mutual exploitation and corruption in occupation era Japan finds its echoes in contemporary North Korea. Instead of obtaining the pigs from corrupt American military personnel in order to sell them on the black market, in the new version, Soonchun City residents raise the pigs in apartment buildings, feeding them the grain waste from the home-brewing operation. (Their sniffy cousins in Pyongyang normally raise chickens instead of pigs in their apartments “because they are smaller and easier to look after.”)
Now all we have to do is find some financing. I hear that Kim Jong-il is movie fan.
