The North Korean Hotel That Feels Like Alcatraz

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Every day this week, we’ll bring you a dispatch from the world’s most unlikely film festival, which ran September 17-24. We would’ve done it in real time, but, um, did we mention this is North Korea?

The revolving restaurant on the 47th floor of Pyongyang’s Yanggakdo International Hotel revolves so slowly my group spends thirty minutes debating whether it revolves at all. We’re convinced it’s all an illusion, some kind of trick North Korea is pulling on us.

THE FULL SERIES

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It’s not a trick. The restaurant does move. But North Korea can feel like that sometimes: both real and not. The Yanggakdo—a.k.a. headquarters for the Pyongyang International Film Festival—itself feels imagined, a spectral fortress on an island in the middle of Pyongyang. It literally is on an island, halfway across the Taedong River, which conveniently prevents mischievous tourists from wandering away from their guides and into town alone. It’s like Alcatraz with a pool.

At 47 stories, the Yanggakdo is in the second tallest building in North Korea, after the unoccupied, pyramid-shaped Ryugyong Hotel. It features a tea room-slash-brewpub and a mail room-slash-Internet café, where you can send emails but not receive them. There’s a bookstore selling the many works of the Great and Dear Leaders, and a number of souvenir shops. You get BBC in your room. The lobby plays soft Korean Muzak and smells like mashed potatoes. It has six elevators, and if two are working, it’s small miracle. (The Yanggakdo also has a mysterious, creepy 5th floor, which is only accessible by stairs. Visit at your own risk.)

In what’s called the Korean side of the basement there’s a billiards room, a ping-pong room, a bowling alley, a hair salon, and a no-funny-business massage parlor. In the Chinese basement, there’s a stained-carpet Egyptian-themed casino packed with chain-smoking businesspeople from the mainland, speaking in provincial dialects. There’s a Macao restaurant with dried shark fins on display at the entrance, and a second massage parlor rumored to offer the "full-body" treatment, if you catch my drift.

The Yanggakdo has five restaurants, although the food doesn’t vary much between in each one. The breakfast buffet each morning offers fried eggs, toast, kimchi, instant coffee, and "rice gruel." (Not bad with a little salt.) One day we have the unfortunate occasion to eat lunch in the revolving restaurant. We’re served meat pie, cold French fries, and penne covered in something like ketchup. I nibble on it and eventually just ask for kimchi and rice. (In all fairness to the Yanggakdo, the bibimbap in the Korean restaurant is fantastic.)

On the hotel’s lot is the Pyongyang International Cinema Hall, one of the festival’s screening locations. The exterior looks like a postmodern bunker and the vast interior is lit only by skylights and strung Christmas lights. The entire complex, as big as a high school, has just three cinemas. One of them, a 2,000-seater, is packed at every screening we’re able to catch.

Most nights the delegates—filmmakers, distributors, and others on the fringes of the global movie business—meet in the lobby pub. They actually brew the beer in the back, and it’s not bad. Malty and smooth.

We’re kept on a separate schedule than the delegates, so at night is the only chance we have to mingle. They come from all over—Brazil, Germany, China. I imagine their itinerary is all champagne brunches and backroom meetings. Not so. One French distributor with a white mustache says he thought he’d be watching a lot more films, since, you know, it’s a film festival. In a week he’s only been allowed to see a handful of movies; the rest of time he’s being chaperoned all over town to see the sites.

A German filmmaker complains of the festival’s lack of parties. "It’s boring," he says in that particular German way that makes one’s blood boil. "I’m bored. Sure it’s interesting for a few days, but I want to go. I’m done. There’s no scene here."

Tomorrow: Will Kim Jong-un emerge from hiding to hand Fast Girls top prize? Dreams come true and hearts are crushed at the award ceremony.

Related: North Korea’s Movie Snacks Taste Like Cat Breath