The Red Chapel by Mads Brügger

“Mads Brügger, don’t you have any moral scruples?”, Jacob asks his director at one point, when once again he can’t believe what Brügger expects him to do. Well, he doesn’t. That’s what one has to appreciate after watching his documentary The Red Chapel. Brügger travels to North Korea, determined to “explore the very core of evil” he suspects is at work there. To do so, he’s not only armed with a lack of scruples, but also with Jacob Nossell and Simon Jul Jørgensen, a Danish comedy duo with roots in South Korea. Simon is grumpy looking, bald-headed and heavily tattooed; Jacob is young, funny and – by his own definition – a spastic.

It’s Brügger’s firm belief that comedy can expose the weak spots of all dictatorships. Thus he plans to show the real face of North Korea by confronting it with a good dose of Danish humour: The Red Chapel, their fake comedy troupe, hits Pyongyang. It’s a colourful, yet not very funny mixture of slapstick, tap dancing, whoopee cushions and Oasis songs that they want to perform in front of an exclusive audience in North Korea’s capital. Of course, laughter is not what the trio is aiming for; they want to provoke some cracks in the stiff masks of the most loyal followers of Kim Jong-Il.

But can you play the court jester in an evil kingdom, where millions of people have been systematically starved to death by their dear leader? Is it possible to surprise an audience that has been living under a totalitarian Stalinist rule all its life with Danish skits from the 1960s? And is it really a clever idea to ask a handicapped comedian to perform in a place where it’s suspected that people like him are killed right after birth or sent to detention camps?

The Red Chapel proves that it is actually possible. But it’s not fun and games to do so. From the very beginning, the trio is embraced by their own little dear leader, the omnipresent Mrs. Pak. She’s the systems watchdog, their “ caretaker of the virtual reality ”, as Brügger puts it. A reality in which children are not starving but smiling, and where Jacob isn’t detained but smothered by care. The whole project is always at risk of being taken over by the state’s propaganda and turned into a part of Kim Jong Il’s obscene vaudeville act – a situation which is sometimes unbearable for the team. It’s Brügger’s voiceover commentary that doesn’t allow the audience to forget: North Korea is not a surrealistic fantasy, and behind all the fake smiles there’s a disgusting reality, consisting of fear and unbelievable violence.

By Jens Geiger