Alvaro Longoria’s handsomely-shot video diary of a short visit to North Korea, is as frustrating as it is intriguing. Having entered the planet’s most notorious state with the assistance of Alejandro Cao, a 40-year-old Spanish mouthpiece with the unwieldy title “Special Delegate on North Korea’s Committee for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries”, it quickly becomes clear to film-maker Longoria that under the watchful, omnipresent gaze of his guides, he won’t get to peak behind any curtains in Pyongyang.
Plan B, enacted with the assistance of his editors Alex Marquez and Victoria Lammers, sees Longoria attempting to find the truth of North Korea, somewhere between the regime’s ‘truth’ and the often ludicrous headlines that characterise Western reporting.
No, Kim's uncle was not eaten by dogs, CNN - that story originated from a satirical Chinese blog. And no, North Korea has never claimed to find a unicorn, contrary to what you may have heard on Fox News' O'Reilly Factor.
The trouble with Plan B is that nothing in the documentary is credible. Pyongyang’s gleaming new tower blocks and transport system suggests that the famine of the 1990s known as the Great Anguish has passed; children in a local park shout out “Barcelona” when Longoria asks them their favourite La Liga team, suggesting their cultural lives are not as hermetical as has been frequently suggested.
But for every person who cries when they contemplate the passing of the Dear Leader, there’s a representative from Amnesty International to cry “scam”.
When Longoria is brought to a communion-free mass, he notes that the church and its congregation may be staged; when he tours an empty war museum, he notes that no one else is there; when he visits the demilitarised zone, he’s confronted with a colourful wedding party.
Time and again, one side reminds him that “all Korean people are happy to lead such happy, civilised lives”, while other contributors speak of human rights abuses.
Ultimately, the dialectics don’t get us anywhere and the enigmatic state remains precisely that. Everything you know about North Korea is a lie. Or maybe it’s the truth. Or something.
