Determined to stop a gas mine development project that is threatening her home in Sidney, filmmaker Anna BROINSOWSKI chooses as her form of resistance a North-Korean style socialist propaganda film. She actually visits North Korea in order to learn how to make films according to the “Great Leader” KIM Jung-il’s famed manifesto “Cinema and Directing,” so that she can make an Australian version of a Juche film. The North Korean filmmakers Anna meets are at first skeptical of her intention to make an Australian movie using North Korean cinematic techniques, but they are eventually moved by her pitch that her film will tell the story of heroic women workers struggling against the tyranny of capitalists. So for the first time in the world, they teach KIM Jong-il’s filmmaking techniques to a woman filmmaker from the West. The outcome is a revolutionary heroic melodrama that opens with a scene that is reminiscent of Bollywood rather than The Sound of Music and ends on a didactic note, with victory going to the proletariat of Sidney. The director’s perspective sets her work apart from other films that portray North Korea through a Western prism in that she chose North Korean cinema as her subject matter. (SEO Min-won)