South Korean media, especially music and movies, has been on the rise in international popularity lately. From
Train to Busan, to
Parasite, to
Minari, to
Squid Game, we are in an absolute golden age of Korean entertainment. However, the more Korean films you digest, the more likely one question will pop up: what's North Korea doing? There's not much the general public knows about North Korea except for what's put on the news. However, since it's a closed society, people can't help but be curious as to what lies inside. As a naturally curious person, I wanted answers, and to me, one of the best ways to get a quick helping of culture is by watching their movies. As you can imagine, there aren't many (at least that we know of) North Korean films and many of them were created by dictator
Kim Jong-il who had a passion for film. Though, that is when I discovered the famed
Pulgasari (1985), the North Korean Godzilla film with a wild story.
Kim Jong-il loved cinema so much that, he established an underground operation to get bootleg copies of international films that were banned in North Korea, much to the dismay of his father Kim Il-sung. He supposedly gathered a library of over 15,000 movies and especially liked action movies such as
