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<\/p>\n\n A North Korean film is captivating audiences with scenes and storylines they have never seen before in a state-approved movie.\n <\/p>\n
\n In \u201cDays and Nights of Confrontation,\u201d a man is suffocated with a plastic bag. A particularly unlucky character is stabbed by her own husband, later injured after being struck by a car, and ultimately murdered. A suicide bomb vest appears on screen, its wires exposed. There is an extramarital affair and even brief partial nudity.\n <\/p>\n
\n After drawing crowds in North Korean cinemas last year, \u201cDays and Nights\u201d reached a far larger audience this month when it aired for the first time on state television, signaling official approval of a film that breaks long-standing cinematic taboos in the nation\u2019s state-controlled entertainment industry.\n <\/p>\n
\n The identity of film\u2019s producer \u2013 the Korean April 25 Film Studio, which is responsible for North Korea\u2019s most ideologically significant films \u2013 makes its embrace of graphic violence and thriller-style storytelling especially notable.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cA character getting suffocated with a plastic bag\u2026that\u2019s something I\u2019ve certainly never seen in a DPRK movie,\u201d said Justin Martell, an American filmmaker who attended the Pyongyang International Film Festival last year.\n <\/p>\n
\n The sexual content \u2013 tame by global standards, is also strikingly explicit in conservative North Korea.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cAnd I will say there was some partial nudity as well, which I\u2019ve also certainly never seen in a DPRK movie,\u201d he added, using the initials of the reclusive nation\u2019s official name.\n <\/p>\n
\n North Korean movies are typically experienced collectively. Audiences watch in packed theaters or at workplace-organized screenings in cultural halls, where reactions are visible and shared. Laughter, gasps and applause are not uncommon, according to defectors and foreign visitors who have attended such events. In that setting, a film designed to shock carries added weight.\n <\/p>\n
\n The story is set in the mid-2000s and centers on betrayal, both personal and political, culminating in a plot to assassinate late North Korean leader Kim Jong Il \u2013 father of current leader Kim Jong Un \u2013 by blowing up his train.\n <\/p>\n
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\n Because of the tightly controlled nature of North Korean society, independent accounts from ordinary moviegoers are impossible to obtain. But none of this would have passed censorship standards even a decade ago. Yet \u201cDays and Nights\u201d was promoted as a prestige production and honored at the Pyongyang film festival with awards for Best Actor and Best Sound Effects.\n <\/p>\n
\n The film is provocative, but not subversive. It exists squarely within North Korea\u2019s rigid moral universe: betrayal leads to ruin; loyalty to the state is the only safe refuge. What is new is the delivery. The production values are higher, the pacing quicker, the style unmistakably modern. It borrows the visual grammar of Hollywood thrillers in ways North Korean cinema long avoided.\n <\/p>\n
\n That shift may reflect a realization inside leader Kim Jong Un\u2019s government about who its audience is becoming, and what it now takes to hold the attention of younger people.\n <\/p>\n
\n Martell said North Korea\u2019s domestic film and television industry had changed little for decades.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cDomestic film production and TV production\u2026 has largely relied on familiar storylines and production approaches,\u201d he explained. The industry has faced an apparent stagnation over the last 20 years, and during this period, Martell said modest, low-budget material was made over major feature films.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cIn recent years the government has gotten much more involved and put a lot of money into these new productions,\u201d Martell said.\n <\/p>\n
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\n The storyline of \u201cDays and Nights\u201d closely echoes a real explosion in 2004 at Ryongchon train station near the Chinese border. At the time, North Korean authorities described the blast as an accident. Outside the country, speculation spread that it may have been an assassination attempt. Inside North Korea, the subject remained largely unspoken in public.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cAs far as I know, the government has never acknowledged the Ryongchon disaster as anything but an accident,\u201d Martell said. \u201cEveryone has kind of known about it as a rumor. So to see it as a proper storyline in a North Korean film is extremely interesting \u2013 and definitely a first.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n In the final act, the assassination plot collapses. The conspirators fail, and the main character is arrested \u2013 reinforcing the film\u2019s core lesson that betrayal of the state is always punished.\n <\/p>\n
\n From the 1960s through the 1980s, North Korean films tended to fall into three categories: revolutionary war epics, melodramas about ideological purity and historical allegories glorifying the Kim family.\n <\/p>\n
\n One of the country\u2019s most famous films, \u201cThe Flower Girl,\u201d tells the story of a peasant woman brutalized under Japanese colonial rule. Her suffering is extreme, but largely symbolic. Violence is suggested rather than shown, and emotional excess replaces physical brutality. Salvation arrives not through suspense or shock, but through revolutionary awakening.\n <\/p>\n
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\n Even when films dealt with enemies, they were usually external and uncomplicated. In Korean War epics like \u201cWolmi Island,\u201d villains are foreign and obvious, while North Korean characters remain ideologically pure.\n <\/p>\n
\n Later films experimented cautiously with domestic settings. \u201cThe Schoolgirl\u2019s Diary,\u201d released in 2006, focused on family tensions and social expectations, but its conflicts were resolved through moral correction, not destruction. Characters who strayed were guided back into alignment, not violently eliminated.\n <\/p>\n
\n By contrast, \u201cDays and Nights\u201d places betrayal at the center of the story and refuses to soften its consequences. The villain is not a foreign invader or a caricatured class enemy, but a trusted insider \u2014 a prosecutor, a husband, a citizen embedded in society. The movie adopts the structure of modern thrillers: a morally compromised protagonist, escalating personal stakes, kinetic action sequences and an unforgiving final reckoning.\n <\/p>\n
\n The April 25 Film Studio was founded in the years following the Korean War and has long specialized in nationalist epics and revolutionary dramas. For decades, its output followed a strict formula, even as global cinema evolved around it. That began to change under Kim Jong Un, whose government has pushed cultural institutions to modernize presentation without altering ideology. State media has praised \u201cDays and Nights\u201d for drawing audiences with \u201ctension and excitement.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
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\n \u201cFilmmakers I spoke with directly attributed this resurgence to Kim Jong Un, much as his father, Kim Jong Il, once poured money, resources, and personal guidance into the country\u2019s film industry,\u201d Martell said.\n <\/p>\n
\n North Korea has always taken film seriously \u2013 perhaps more seriously than any other authoritarian state. The second-generation leader, Kim Jong Il, did not merely oversee the film industry; he ran it personally as head of the Propaganda and Agitation Department\u2019s arts division. He involved himself in scripts, editing and casting decisions and reportedly maintained a private library of more than 15,000 films, including Hollywood titles banned for public viewing.\n <\/p>\n
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\n Frustrated by the limits of his own cinema, Kim once resorted to a familiar but extreme tactic during his era: kidnapping.\n <\/p>\n
\n In 1978, South Korean actress Choi Eun-hee was abducted in Hong Kong and taken to Pyongyang. Months later, her estranged ex-husband, the acclaimed director Sheen Sang Ok (also known as Shin Sang-ok), was kidnapped in a similar operation. After failed escape attempts and imprisonment, the pair were reunited and ordered to remarry and make films for the state.\n <\/p>\n
\n They would eventually produce 17 movies for North Korea. Among the most notable was \u201cPulgasari\u201d (1985), a monster epic loosely modeled on \u201cGodzilla\u201d that Kim Jong Il personally oversaw as a revolutionary allegory. Promoted domestically as a tale of peasant uprising, the film later became a cult curiosity abroad, often mocked for its special effects but recognized as one of the country\u2019s most technically ambitious productions. Sheen also directed \u201cSalt\u201d (1985), a stark colonial-era drama starring Choi that emphasized personal suffering over spectacle and won her a Best Actress award at the Moscow International Film Festival \u2014 a rare moment of international recognition for North Korean cinema.\n <\/p>\n
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\n What Kim Jong Il did not anticipate was that Sheen and Choi were secretly recording their meetings with him. The tapes, later smuggled out of the country, captured Kim\u2019s strikingly candid criticisms of his own films.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cPeople don\u2019t even want anything new,\u201d he said on one recording.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cWhy do they insist on filming nothing but people crying for all scenes, like there\u2019s been a death in the family?\u201d he complained.\n <\/p>\n