An Authentic Glimpse of a North Korea We’ve Never Seen Before, by a Prize-Winning Filmmaker Anna Broinowski is the only Westerner ever granted full access to North Korea’s propaganda machine, its film industry. Aim High in Creation! is her funny, surreal, insightful account of her twenty-one-day apprenticeship there. At the same time it is a fresh-eyed look, beyond stereotypes, at life in that most secretive of societies. When Anna learned that fracking had invaded downtown Sydney and a coal seam gas well was planned for Sydney Park, she had a brilliant idea: she would seek guidance for a kryptonite-powerful anti-fracking movie from the world’s greatest propaganda factory, apart from Hollywood. After two years of trying, she was allowed to make her case in Pyongyang and was granted full permission to film. She worked closely with the leading lights of North Korean cinema, even playing an American in a military thriller. “Filmmakers are family,” Kim Jong-il’s favorite director told her, and a love of nature and humanity unites peoples. Interviewing loyalists and defectors alike, Anna explored the society she encountered. She offers vivid, sometimes hilarious descriptions of bizarre disconnects and warm friendships in a world without advertisements or commercial culture. Her book, like the prize-winning documentary that resulted from her visit, is a thoughtful plea for better understanding. Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade imprint, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in history--books about World War II, the Third Reich, Hitler and his henchmen, the JFK assassination, conspiracies, the American Civil War, the American Revolution, gladiators, Vikings, ancient Rome, medieval times, the old West, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

'Hilarious, terrifying and fun - much like the 80s, only smarter.' ANNA FUNDER 'Fiercely funny. This is a road trip of danger, love and hope. Brilliant!' JULIA ZEMIRO 'Witty, brave, honest and wise. Mad Max meets 1980s feminism, fuelled by undergraduate outrage and hedonism.' CATHERINE LUMBY Datson Angel is a turbo-charged adventure into the savage heart of 1980s Australia: a place completely alien, yet frighteningly similar, to today. EVERYTHING IN THIS BOOK HAPPENED . . . At seventeen, Anna Broinowski is precocious, naive and convinced she knows how the world works. But O-Week at Sydney University changes that. She's suddenly in a hyper-masculine caste system, where future captains of industry terrorise freshers and invade dorms in naked, screaming packs. Nothing is what she thought it'd be . . . until Anna finds her people. New dreams are made. Playing violin, auditioning for NIDA, losing her virginity. Then Peisley, a gentle giant, talks of a hitchhiking trip up north. And, after agreeing on three rules - never split up, remain platonic, accept every lift that gets them closer to Darwin - Anna decides to go. Hitchhiking the highways leads her into a dystopian dustbowl on society's hard edges, where outsiders must adapt or perish, and women teeter on an existential knife edge. In this flyblown asylum, love and danger collide with the toxic misogyny in the guts of the Australian soul. Anna will learn that the line between victim and survivor can be as cruel as luck and as random as a shiny blue Datson on a red dirt road. Based on her battered travel diary, Datsun Angel is a savage, darkly funny memoir of sex, drugs and violence-fuelled adventure through the brutal 1980s Australian outback. It is a feminist On the Road, told through a #MeToo filter.

'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

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.

Reproduction of the original: The Attache by Thomas Chandler Haliburton

This study analyzes North Korean comedy films from the late 1960s to present day. It examines the most iconic comedy films and comedians to show how North Koreans have enjoyed themselves and have established a culture of humor that challenges, subverts, and, at times, reinforces the dominant political ideology. The author argues that comedy films, popular comedians, and the viewers have an intricate interdependent relationship that shaped the film culture—the pre/post production of filmmaking, film-watching experience, and the legacies of actors—in North Korea.