Kim Puts On a Festival; Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Cannes anymore.

Byline: Ron Gluckman

Pyongyang is a festival like no other," began British documentary-maker Daniel Gordon. The audience could hardly disagree--and not just because they were in North Korea, where dissenters get thrown in prison. Hardly anything here is the same as anyplace else. The rest of Gordon's words were drowned out by loudspeakers blaring a simultaneous Korean translation of his opening address to the nine-day Pyongyang International Film Festival. No matter: nothing could have prepared most North Koreans for some of this year's offerings.

For many of the foreign attendees, the most thrilling scenes weren't on the screen but in the audience. Among the festival's 90 films from 40-odd countries, one of the biggest favorites was Tuesday's showing of the 2002 comedy "Bend It Like Beckham." North Koreans roared at the jokes and gasped at the love scenes-- an eye-popping departure from the government-made propaganda flicks that are standard viewing fare in the Hermit Kingdom. "It was incredible," said a stunned filmgoer who has visited the country regularly for the past decade. "The entire crowd responded spontaneously and naturally. That was something I've never seen before."

Western films remain forbidden to the average North Korean. Instead they are fed a diet of cheesy formula fare: brave citizens struggle against a stream of villains intent on wrecking the country, everyone from Japanese colonists to decadent American imperialists to the latter's puppets, the South Koreans. "I knew the plot," one Beijing filmmaker said after a private screening of a North Korean drama. "Even before people opened their mouths, I knew what they would say and how they'd say it. Everything in North Korea is like China, long ago, like in my parents' time."

The country's supreme ...