Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, by Barbara Demick

Barbara Demick, the L.A. Times’s excellent correspondent covering North Korea, has written a book about the people that most big media correspondents have dedicated their careers to ignoring.

Yet every town in North Korea, no matter how small, has a movie theater, thanks to Kim Jong Il’s conviction that film is an indispensable tool for instilling loyalty in the masses. When Mi-ran was growing up, Hollywood films were banned from North Korea, as were virtually all other foreign films, with the exception of an occasional entry from Russia, and the North Korean films all bore the same message: the path to happiness is self-sacrifice and suppression of individualism for the good of the collective, while capitalism is pure degradation. Mi-ran didn’t mind the propaganda. She just loved going to the movies, though she especially liked the Russian films because they were less political and more romantic. Ticket prices were kept low–just half a won, a few cents, about the same as a soft drink–and from the time Mi-ran was old enough to walk to the theater herself, she begged her mother for money to buy tickets. Some movies were deemed too risqué for children, such as the 1984 film Oh My Love in which it was suggested that a man and a woman kissed. But Mi-ran saw everything she could.

I’ve been a fan of Demick’s work for years. Read an excerpt and purchase more here.