Propaganda (2012)

A film about the Capitalist world that is presented as according to the ideology of North Korea. It is actually a film made by New Zealand based director Slavko Martinov, who states:

It’s part of a trilogy of films about propaganda.  It was a social experiment about propaganda.  I wanted to make a film about propaganda.  If you make a film about how propaganda works, it’s going to be as dry as a bone.  I had a short list of Iran, Cuba, and North Korea.  North Korea sticks out like a sore thumb.  It’ll be about propaganda in a propaganda campaign, a metafiction.  It’s propaganda-squared.  You can’t just do it and go to a distributor.  After the first wave of people saw it, it blew up.  There’s nothing else you can do but conduct a social experiment this way.  People came up to me at IDFA to buy this film, I said you know it’s online.  I could see them become sick.  Really no one’s seen this film in the scheme of things.  It’s still a hidden film.

There are of course serious flaws in the arguments this film presents. Perhaps the most obvious is the idea that the 'West' is a homogenous whole of like minded 'slaves' without the ability to think for themselves or access alternatives to the horror that is consumption based, market driven capitalism. This is clearly untrue and the presence of this film itself on the Internet contradicts that premise.

Apart from such simplistic dimensions of the critique, the assessment of how media, production and consciousness are a triangulation of reality that only allows individual expression through consumption is not far from accurate in many cases. For this reason I believe Propaganda is worth watching.

Controversial to its core, this hard-hitting anti-Western propaganda film, which looks at the influence of American culture on the rest of the world from a North Korean perspective, has been called "Genius!" by Michael Moore, and has been described as 'either a damning indictment of 21st Century culture or the best piece of propaganda in a generation.' As first reported on mainstream new around the world, Propaganda is allegedly a video smuggled out of North Korea. Brilliantly using this 'fake North Korean propaganda' found-footage device, Slavko Martinov first parodies its language and stylings, before targeting the mountain of hypocrisies and contradictions that make up the modern Western world. In doing so, Propaganda delivers a devastating blow to those who might be quick to laugh at 'backward' ideologies before considering how 21st century political and cultural trends have hurt the moral high ground of the rest of the world. - Review from MVD (where you can buy the film)

Content:

0:00 Introduction
6:54 Creating Ideas & Illusions
16:48 Fear
19:35 Religion
25:00 Beware the 1%
28:10 Emulating Psychosis
31:21 Rewriting History
41:15 The Birth of Propaganda
45:49 Cover Ups and Omissions
54:10 Complicity
58:05 Censorship
1:01:50 International Diplomacy
1:06:14 Television
1:08:11 Advertising
1:14:36 The Cult of Celebrity
1:22:34 Distraction
1:28:01 Terrorism
1:35:00 The Revolution Starts Now