By Daniel Levitsky, June 11th 2013. Every revolutionary regime
needs a master narrative. In the mid-1960s, President Kim Il
Sung’s son, General Kim Jong Il, was put in charge of party
propaganda and agitation, a role that encouraged his growing
interest in the arts, and especially in theatre and film. Under
his enthusiastic tutelage, not only was Korean cinema revamped,
renewed and made to glorify the activities of his father, but an
entirely new type of live entertainment, the Korean
revolutionary opera, was born. At a special party meeting at the
Pyongyang Film Studios, held to inaugurate his son as the mentor
of Korean filmmakers and artists, Kim Il Sung told his directors
that Korean art (in all its forms) should depict and dramatize
two great historical events above all: the anti-Japanese
struggle of the 1930s, and the traumatic Korean War of 1950 to
1953. These themes not only lay at the heart of numerous
historical films made in the DPRK between the mid-1960s and late
1980s, but also formed the heroic