Jim Finn has cornered the market in communist iconography as comedy. In Interkosmos (EIFF 2006), he developed a wonderfully comic account of a fictional East German space programme; in La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo, he explored a Peruvian women’s prison housing followers of the Shining Path. Now he turns his attention to the “hermit kingdom”, North Korea. “Juche” is (really!) the political ideology and official state religion of North Korea, a benighted country that suffers under the most illiberal regime currently in power, anywhere. The core tenets of Juche are “independence in politics”, “self-sustenance in the economy” and “self-sufficiency in national defense”. What exactly this means is a matter for debate in Pyongyang. Closer to home, Finn develops a semi-fictionalised and often hilarious critique of this abstruse and repressive ideology.

The film is a (mock) documentary about a young filmmaker in North Korea. Most of the screen time is taken up with this fictional filmmaker’s own, putative, work; her output consists mainly of instructional videos promoting Juche. This conceit gives Finn room to lambast the outlandish strictures of Kim Jong-il’s film theory.

The documentary of the North Korean mass games is astonishing – it’s helpfully (!?) entitled Flesh Ring in the Sea of Blood. The instructional videos comparing “English as a capitalist language” with “English as a socialist language” are witheringly funny. Perhaps the most effective satire is in the sequences mapping text from Kim’s 1982 treatise “On the Juche Idea” over scenes from actual North Korean dramas – alarmingly, the (actual) films follow the dictator’s edicts on a point-by-point basis. Finn thus builds a scathing critique of what it means to make art under one of the most repugnant regimes in the world. Crucially, he remains alive to the comedy that can flow from such horrors. The Juche Idea is a mordant criticism of a twisted regime’s twisted ideology.