Talk:Cinema of Korea/Archives/2013

North Korean films

We shouldn't take the number of North Korean films listed on the IMDB as evidence of how many films the country has produced or how productive the industry has been at different times. For obscure areas like North Korean cinema, the IMDB depends on the individual initiative of users in adding data, and, as the article says, information on North Korean films is difficult to find. An article from 1992 [1] states that the country made about eighty films a year at that time, which would suggest that the number listed on the IMDB is a tiny fraction of North Korea's total output. See also the discussion on Talk:List of North Korean films.--GagHalfrunt 11:22, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

i agree wholeheartedly with the poster above. the north korean film industry probably did make about eighty films per year between nineteen seventy and nineteen eighty-nine, which would be about fifteen or sixteen HUNDRED films, not the low number listed in the imdb. i don't think the north korean film industry has been "secretive" about its output. if north korean films are not particularly well known in the west, it is because of laziness on the part of western researchers. i remember reading reviews of north korean films in variety during the eighties and even during the seventies, and some of these reviews were for very obscure projects. i get the idea that variety had a stringer in pyongyang who attended the premiers of all (or virtually all) north korean films and reported back on these movies to that publication's home office in new york. a search through the variety archives would probably reveal dozens (if not in fact hundreds) of reviews of north korean films. there are bound collections of variety film reviews. that would be the first place to look. after that, one could search through the individual issues of variety, a laborious task but probably quite rewarding. then one might turn to the north korean sources themselves. i am sure that it is possible to find either microfilm or hard copy version of newspapers and magazines published in pyongyang. if you went through a good cross section of these periodicals, i'm sure you would find references to MOST north korean film productions. maybe the easiest way to get information about north korean films would be to contact the north korean film commission directly. the north korean government may have attempted to hinder the distribution of western films in the dprk, but i don't see why it should be secretive about it's OWN country's cinematic output. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.127.228.117 (talk) 16:45, 6 November 2013 (UTC)