Top-rated North Korea movies

1 Under the Sun (2015)

Over the course of one year, this film follows the life of an ordinary Pyongyang family whose daughter was chosen to take part in Day of the Shining Star (Kim Jong-il's birthday) celebration. While North Korean government wanted a propaganda film, the director kept on filming between the scripted scenes. The ritualized explosions of color and joy contrast sharply with pale everyday reality, which is not particularly terrible, but rather quite surreal.

2 Dennis Rodman's Big Bang in PyongYang (2015)

Dennis Rodman is on a mission. After forging an unlikely friendship with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, he wants to improve relations between North Korea and the US by staging a historic basketball game between the two countries. But the North Korean team isn't the only opposition he'll face... Condemned by the NBA and The Whitehouse, and hounded every step of the way by the press, can Dennis keep it together and make the game happen? Or will it go up in a mushroom cloud of smoke? For the first time, discover the true story of what happened when Dennis Rodman took a team of former-NBA players to North Korea and staged the most controversial game of basketball the world has never seen.

3 The Defector: Escape from North Korea (2012)

Dragon smuggles North Korean defectors across borders for a living, and his latest undercover trip with Sook-Ja and Yong-hee takes an unexpected turn when they are left stranded in China. This is just the start of an extraordinary 5,000 km journey.

4 Don't Expect Praises (2012)

On the day he was supposed to graduate from elementary school, a precocious boy runs away from home and goes with his best friend on a journey to his friend’s faraway home. He encounters diverse, interesting people and discovers that “precocious” isn’t what he had once believed.

5 Sex Marathon (2009)

6 An Jung Gun Shoots Ito Hirobumi (1979)

This is a film based on the revolutionary drama "An Jung Gun shoots Ito Hirobumi", an immortal classic created by president Kim Il Sung during his early revolutionary activities. The "USA five-point treaty" was fabricated, the country becomes a colony of the Japanese imperialists. An Jung Gun, a patriotic man of will who has been on the move with boundless love for the country and hatred for the Japanese aggressors thinks that assassination of ringleaders of aggression and traitors would lead to the liberation of the country. He shoots Ito Hirobumi, the chieftain of Korean invasion, at Haerbin railway station. However, his longing for the country's independence can't be realized and the country falls in to a colony of the Japanese imperialists day after day. Longing for the leader of the nation, he heads to the execution site.

7 Legend of Chunhyang (1959)

Based on an old Korean legend about the tender and beautiful love of the poor girl Chun Hyang and the son of the formidable and cruel ruler Mong Nyoung.

8 Salt (1985)

Salt (Sogum, 1985): A story set in Gando in the 1930s. In the film, Choi Eun-hee plays Song-ryul's wife. The family hides a wealthy Korean-Chinese merchant, and the father is killed in a fight between the Japanese police and the Chinese bandits. She believes that her husband died because of the communists.

9 Tumangan River (1961)

A screen adaptation of the first part of the eponymous trilogy by Lee Gi Young about the national liberation struggle of the Korean people against the Japanese invaders in the late 19th - early 20th centuries.

10 Son of the Land (1964)

Told in three parts, Yong Min, who prior to the liberation of Korea received all sorts of humiliations and insults while serving at the landowner, becomes the owner of the land in socialist Korea.