To Build His Own Hollywood, Kim Jong Il Had To Kidnap Filmmakers From South Korea. Decades Later, North Korea Still Can’t Make A Good Film

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When Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite won best picture at the 2020 Oscars, it confirmed what cinephiles had been saying for decades: that Korea has fantastic directors, scriptwriters, and acting talent. Keen-eyed readers would probably realize that “Korea” here refers to South Korea, with North Korean cinema being a rather unknown anomaly. It’s easy to blame a lack of resources, poor markets, and oppressive censorship, but, for example, the Soviet Union managed to produce at least a few films capable of winning awards and being viewed in the West.

​North Korea has been grappling with this same question for decades, trying everything from kidnapping talent from South Korea to just throwing in the towel and copying Hollywood. The strategy was simple: if they can’t win awards, they might at least try to win over audiences outside of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). What do Western audiences like? The two thrillers they released in 2022 and 2025 suggest that they thought sex and violence would carry them to success.

“Days and Nights of Confrontation,” sometimes just called Days and Nights, is a sequel to 2022’s One Day and One Night, both films about an anti-hero attempting to kill North Korea’s founding leader, Kim Il Sung. Both are a rather violent break with the normally conservative cinema North Korea produces, although neither goes as far as resembling anything actually criticizing the government.

But sex and violence are only the latest move in a decades-long campaign to make the world watch — a campaign that has driven the regime to lengths no other film industry has ever had to consider, and still left it with almost nothing anyone wants to see.