Sex, death and betrayal: This North Korean movie shows things audiences have never seen before

By Will Ripley, CNN

(CNN) — A North Korean film is captivating audiences with scenes and storylines they have never seen before in a state-approved movie.

In “Days and Nights of Confrontation,” 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.

After drawing crowds in North Korean cinemas last year, “Days and Nights” 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’s state-controlled entertainment industry.

The identity of film’s producer – the Korean April 25 Film Studio, which is responsible for North Korea’s most ideologically significant films – makes its embrace of graphic violence and thriller-style storytelling especially notable.

“A character getting suffocated with a plastic bag…that’s something I’ve certainly never seen in a DPRK movie,” said Justin Martell, an American filmmaker who attended the Pyongyang International Film Festival last year.

The sexual content – tame by global standards, is also strikingly explicit in conservative North Korea.

“And I will say there was some partial nudity as well, which I’ve also certainly never seen in a DPRK movie,” he added, using the initials of the reclusive nation’s official name.

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.

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 – father of current leader Kim Jong Un – by blowing up his train.

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 “Days and Nights” was promoted as a prestige production and honored at the Pyongyang film festival with awards for Best Actor and Best Sound Effects.

The film is provocative, but not subversive. It exists squarely within North Korea’s 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.

That shift may reflect a realization inside leader Kim Jong Un’s government about who its audience is becoming, and what it now takes to hold the attention of younger people.

Martell said North Korea’s domestic film and television industry had changed little for decades.

“Domestic film production and TV production… has largely relied on familiar storylines and production approaches,” 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.

“In recent years the government has gotten much more involved and put a lot of money into these new productions,” Martell said.

The storyline of “Days and Nights” 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.

“As far as I know, the government has never acknowledged the Ryongchon disaster as anything but an accident,” Martell said. “Everyone 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 – and definitely a first.”

In the final act, the assassination plot collapses. The conspirators fail, and the main character is arrested – reinforcing the film’s core lesson that betrayal of the state is always punished.

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.

One of the country’s most famous films, “The Flower Girl,” 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.

Even when films dealt with enemies, they were usually external and uncomplicated. In Korean War epics like “Wolmi Island,” villains are foreign and obvious, while North Korean characters remain ideologically pure.

Later films experimented cautiously with domestic settings. “The Schoolgirl’s Diary,” 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.

By contrast, “Days and Nights” 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 — 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.

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 “Days and Nights” for drawing audiences with “tension and excitement.”

“Filmmakers 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’s film industry,” Martell said.

North Korea has always taken film seriously – 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’s 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.

Frustrated by the limits of his own cinema, Kim once resorted to a familiar but extreme tactic during his era: kidnapping.

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.

They would eventually produce 17 movies for North Korea. Among the most notable was “Pulgasari” (1985), a monster epic loosely modeled on “Godzilla” 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’s most technically ambitious productions. Sheen also directed “Salt” (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 — a rare moment of international recognition for North Korean cinema.

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’s strikingly candid criticisms of his own films.

“People don’t even want anything new,” he said on one recording.

“Why do they insist on filming nothing but people crying for all scenes, like there’s been a death in the family?” he complained.

The filmmakers escaped during a sanctioned trip to Europe in 1986, eventually settling in the United States. Decades later, the recordings would form the backbone of the 2016 documentary “The Lovers and the Despot.”

Kim Jong Il grasped a truth that still shapes North Korean propaganda today: it only works if people watch it.

In today’s North Korea, smartphones are becoming more common. State-approved apps offer music, games, books and video. An internal streaming service mimics global platforms while tightly censoring content. At the same time, illicit South Korean dramas, pop music and films continue to circulate on USB drives and memory cards, offering younger North Koreans a competing vision of modern life.

Punishments for consuming such material have grown harsher. Teenagers have been publicly sentenced to long terms of hard labor for watching or distributing South Korean media. A 2020 law codified severe penalties for cultural consumption deemed disloyal.

But repression alone is no longer sufficient. Attention must also be won. “Days and Nights” is part of that effort — faster, darker and more visceral than earlier propaganda films, dressed in the language of modern entertainment but carrying an old, familiar message: plotting against the leader will end in disaster.

This story has been updated with additional details.

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