North Korea is the most hated, but also the least known country on the planet.
Many signs attest to the individual’s submission to an ideology: flags and slogans glorifying the party, monuments, statues and portraits bearing the effigy of their leaders. Propaganda achieves the status of a work of art in a totalitarian system. What is hidden is out of reach, so by showing everyday reality we can make the mechanisms of power visible and palpable.
Such neutrality can be extraordinarily powerful, revealing the extent to which this regime functions as a delusional machine, hypnotising an entire people and reducing reality to spectacle. It involves using images to win over a subject who acknowledges authority exclusively through the image. North Koreans often look cheerful. Taken individually, as couples or as families, they seem to show a degree of happiness and joie de vivre that conflicts with the realities of the regime. And indirectly, on the question of individual freedoms and their manifestations in the Western world. These questions turn out to be at the heart of a current in thinking that goes far beyond this hermit nation’s label as the last incarnation of communism.