> Skip to content
  • Published: 27 May 2015
  • ISBN: 9781743483367
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320

The Director is the Commander




Funny, multi-layered and utterly compelling, The Director is the Commander is a gripping account of an extraordinary journey inside North Korea, a nation we can usually only see from the outside looking in.

'We were all propagandists; the only differences were our goals.'

Looking for respite from her crumbling marriage and determined to stop a coal seam gas mine near her Sydney home, filmmaker Anna Broinowski finds wisdom and inspiration in the strangest of places: North Korea. Guided by the late Dear Leader Kim Jong Il's manifesto The Cinema and Directing, Broinowski, in a world first, travels to Pyongyang to collaborate with North Korea's top directors, composers and movie stars to make a powerful anti-fracking propaganda film.

The Director is the Commander centres around the bizarre twenty-one day shoot Broinowski did in North Korea to make her documentary, Aim High in Creation! She meets and befriends artists and apparatchiki, defectors and loyalists, and gains a new insight into the world's most secretive regime. Her adventures are set against a parallel exploration of propaganda in general: both in its ham-fisted North Korean form and its sophisticated but no less pervasive incarnation in the corporate West.

Funny, multi-layered and utterly compelling, The Director is the Commander is a gripping account of an extraordinary journey inside a nation we can usually only see from the outside looking in.
'One of the many rewarding aspects of this wild book is the way Broinowski reveals a side of life in North Korea not seen in standard exposes. While acutely aware of the deprivations and absurdities, she is also alive to the nuances of daily life there.' Saturday Age Pick of the Week
 

  • Published: 27 May 2015
  • ISBN: 9781743483367
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320

About the author

Anna Broinowski

Anna Broinowski is an author and filmmaker who has been tracking the illicit, subversive and bizarre since her 1995 film on the Japanese cultural underground, Hell Bento!!
Her films include Aim High in Creation! (about the North Korean propaganda film industry), Forbidden Lie$ (about hoax author Norma Khouri), Helen’s War (about anti-nuclear campaigner Dr Helen Caldicott), Sexing the Label (about queer Sydney in the 1990s) and Pauline Hanson: Please Explain!, which screened on SBS in 2016.
They’ve won stuff, including three AACTAs, a Walkley, the Rome Festival Cult prize, Best Film at Silverdocs USA, a NSW Premier’s Literary Award, the Writer’s Guild of America Best Nonfiction Screenplay and a Russian Film Critics’ prize shaped like an elephant.
After covering Kim Jong Il in her first book, The Director is the Commander, and Senator Pauline Hanson in her second one, Please Explain, Anna is looking forward to not writing about politicians for a while.

Also by Anna Broinowski

See all

Awards & recognition

Nita B Kibble Literary Awards

Longlisted  •  2016  •  Dobbie Literary Award