DPRK

Above: two film stills from ‘DPRK’ and an exhibition overview at ‘De Belofte Ingelost’ at Kunstliefde, Utrecht, The Netherlands

In August 2014 I travelled to North Korea to see what the North Korean ideal looked like, the ideal that’s always presented to tourists and other visitors. I was wondering if some of the things you hear about North Korea in Western media and society would shimmer through the veil of perfection every now and then. Sometimes they did. I was also curious to experience a society which is very different from the one I grew up in, where the government plays a totally different role in everyday life.

While being in the DPRK I only filmed what was allowed to capture on film. The duration of the film is 42 minutes. I described the situations which were not allowed to be captured in a podcast of 11 minutes.

Next to the film and podcast I wrote a travel journal, I kept track of the amount of times guides told our tour group to take pictures (or not to take pictures), and I developed an utopian scent, to give the installation of the entire project an extra boost.

Below is a very short version of the film, which I made for a pecha kucha presentation, it features 20 shorts of 20 seconds each from the DPRK film.