The Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the world's last hard-line Communist sate, has been sealed from outside influences since the Korean War and branded a "rogue state" by the US. Its citizens are portrayed as robotic people cowering to the personality cult of "Dear Leader" Kim Jong-il.
Nicholas Bonner, a British specialist on North Korea who has run the travel agent Koryo Tours (www.koryogroup.com) in Beijing leading tours to the "Hermit Kingdom" for the past 15 years, has shone a light into the dark recesses of the secretive state through producing three acclaimed documentaries on the everyday lives of North Koreans.
"You can't leave the hotel without your guide [all foreign visitors in North Korea are accompanied by Korean minders] and there are lots of restrictions unthinkable to the outside world, but if you are willing to look beyond all these, you will find a human face of the country," said Bonner at the screenings of his first and second documentaries, titled The Game of Their Lives and A State of Mind, respectively, at the Urban Nomad Film Fest (城市游牧影展) last week in Taipei.
Bonner's first experience of North Korea was in 1993 when the landscape architect left his lecturing post at Leeds Metropolitan University and moved to Beijing where he set up a jazz bar in the city. A trip to Pyongyang with his Chinese scholar friend Josh Green turned out to be the beginning of a pioneering tourism business.
"A few minutes after our arrival in the city, we thought 'hey, there is a great business opportunity here' since there were virtually no tourists in this extraordinary place. But we quickly found out why there wasn't anybody in the business; … not many people were interested in visiting North Korea," said Bonner, who puts the annual number of foreign tourists visiting the Hermit Kingdom at around 1,000.
Though his tourism operation seems to come nowhere close to a brisk trade, the plucky pioneer has taken up the role of cultural ambassador between North Korea and the rest of the world by organizing cultural projects, school exchanges and football friendship matches in addition to regular scheduled tours.
In 1997, British director Daniel Gordon contacted Bonner after the North Korean World Cup team of 1966 shocked the world by defeating one of the tournament favorites, Italy, and then vanishing from view after returning home.
With the help of his North Korean football mates, Bonner discovered the whereabouts of the surviving players and the film project The Game of Their Lives took shape.
To most observers, breaking through the political barriers erected by the authoritarian regime in North Korea where photography is restricted and most places are off-limits, would seem to be a mission impossible. But to Bonner, the real problems lay elsewhere.
"The problem was not with the North Koreans but with the funding. Nobody believed we could achieve the unachievable task … . The only film crew that had been granted official access to the country was a Polish team in 1980s," Bonner recalled.
In 2000, after soliciting private donations of US$7,000 from friends and relatives, Bonner and Gordon, along with two cinematographers and a sound man were given unprecedented official access to the players, members of the public and locations and told the incredible story of how the soccer team from the world's only hereditary Communist state arrived in England at the height of the Cold War, beat Italy 1-0 and entered the World Cup quarterfinals.
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