I just saw this and it was great. This was my first North Korean movie. I’m trying to watch North Korean movies to kinda battle my biases about the country. I had a prejudice that North Korean films were always very politically overt, but it doesn’t seem to be the case here, although it does have a plot about farmers rising up against feudal lords. The director of this movie was South Korean and some people say he was kidnapped by North Korea to make movies. I don’t believe that. I think that he went to the north voluntarily but staged the kidnapping so he could one day return to South Korea without repercussions. He had a motive as well, because his movies were surpressed in the south under Park Chung-Hee.

Also the quality of the movie seems to have been restored using AI in this specific upload, so it looks a bit weird at times.

I don’t know why the DPRK doesn’t release these movies outside their borders on the internet in a restored version, since it’s great propaganda to dispell myths about their country.