<em>The Flowers of the Revolution. The North Korean Propaganda Film</em>

Abstract

North Korean cinema is a great unknown for socio-political reasons. Analysing North Korean films is a difficult task, particularly given the absence of existing literature on the country’s film production. This essay constitutes a first approach to a particular, unique and interesting body of films, whose most popular genre is the propaganda film. To this end, an analysis is offered of its most successful film: The Flower Girl (Ik-kyu Choe and Hak Pak, 1972), making a comparison between the evolution of this kind of cinema and the techniques that define it to establish how this genre changes depending on the ideology and the period, while maintaining certain interchangeable themes. The North Korean propaganda film is a hybrid that mixes melodrama with indoctrination, and elements of American cinema with Soviet Constructivism, to pursue a discussion of moral sacrifice, the perversity of the enemy and ideology as the legitimiser of the revolution.