The opening of The Propaganda Game feels like a propaganda film as the camera sweeps over North Korean capital Pyongyang’s most splendiferous buildings, to an orchestral score, as children skateboard and smiling citizenry walk by. The sequence is in fact shot by director Alvaro Longoria himself, anticipating his film’s major point.
Aided by exclusive access behind the world’s last iron curtain gained via a key facilitator, Spaniard Alejandro Cao de Benos, the only foreigner working for the North Korean government, “The Propaganda Game” follows Longoria as he shoots any scene he wants – but on a controlled itinerary and always with company. Rather than dismissing North Korea out-of-hand, or depicting it, as one interviewee puts it, as a kind of freak-show, it portrays the country as a battle-ground in a propaganda war between its ruling regime and a hostile West. Longoria, ironic but gentlemanly, points to falsehoods and its citizens’ plight, sparked by geo-political interest.
John Hopewell
Variety