Have Fun in Pyongyang

The only images of North Korea I’ve ever seen are the ones the government filmed itself: parades where tanks roll endlessly, nuclear tests, synchronized gymnastics where thousands of people form the leader’s face. It’s so relentless and so surreal that the country stops feeling like a place where people actually live. It becomes a permanent broadcast, a loop of propaganda with no frame around it, no life outside the cameras.

That’s what makes Have Fun in Pyongyang almost jarring to watch. Pierre-Olivier François and Patrick Maurus made this documentary over eight years, forty trips just to film ordinary things: harvest festivals, factory floors, singing competitions, weddings. Not monuments or ceremonies. Just life—people bored at work, proud of small things, being silly when they think no one’s watching.

What sits with me is that it doesn’t make North Korea seem more understandable in some grand political sense. It just reminds you that twenty-five million people live there, and living means eating and working and finding small moments of joy within whatever walls are built around you. The country survived the end of the Cold War, a famine that killed hundreds of thousands, decades of isolation. Not because the system works, but because people keep going. You keep going. You find what you can.

Maybe that’s what they discovered: people are still just people, even under the worst circumstances, even when the world has decided their country is nothing but a headline. That’s harder to turn into propaganda than any parade ever could be.