The world has passed judgment: the country is beyond repair.

Our preconceived ideas about

the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea remain firmly in place:

An erratic, Orwellian regime?

paranoid, schizophrenic, a place of modern-day gulags,

a red dynasty, long headed by a despotic film buff,

and now by his son, whose portly appearance is topped with a singular haircut.

And then there's the country's nuclear arsenal —

a threat that makes the self-proclaimed 'innocent'

nations of the world tremble with fear.

When it comes to North Korea, why do we so often resort to clichés?

In light of the difficult and often tragic situation

the country's people find themselves in,

hyperbole seems rather inappropriate.

We're often told that foreigners are not permitted into the country.

That those who do manage to visit are not permitted to see much of anything.

And that those who do manage to see something should remember

it's probably fake.

Someone once insisted to us that there were no high-rises in Pyongyang.

A disorienting claim, given that one of us was living

on the 24th floor of a building on Kwangbok Street at the time.

This film was shot over a period of eight years by three people.

One of us is a translator of Korean.

Between us, we made more than forty trips to North Korea.

But the film does not show prison camps or rocket launch pads —

that's forbidden.

As are images of soldiers, construction sites, shopping malls, gambling,

pictures of people who do not have enough to eat,

and pictures of people who are eating.

Avoiding these images is harder than it might seem.

Entering North Korea is still complicated.

But foreigners are permitted to travel and explore the country,

although they always have a local “minder.”

Visitors are not required to proclaim their loyalty to the state.

Nor do they only see what the state permits them to see.

And it's a myth that you'll never hear laughter in North Korea.

As soon as we leave the city, the roads are riddled with cracks and potholes.

The bumpy journey is hard on drivers and vehicles.

That could explain why broken-down trucks and buses are a common sight.

Depending on the season,

the workers in the fields might be harvesting wheat, rice, or potatoes.

Although much of the country is mountainous,

the rest is primarily devoted to farming.

North Korea hopes to become economically self-sufficient someday.

Every square meter of available land is put to use, even on the steep hillsides.

But only barely 20 percent of the land is arable.

This factory was not filmed in 1920,

but in 2016 using a small camera while exploring the city of Hamhung.

As so often in North Korea, appearances are deceiving.

This is the country's largest fertilizer factory,

which Kim Il-sung honored with more than 30 visits.

It's recently been modernized

in a bid to increase the productivity of the country's cooperative farms.

Cooperative farms like this one,

with its familiar oxcarts,

geese and ducks, and the omnipresent red flags.

Another visit to a collective farm, a year later.

It's raining and everyone has gone to seek shelter.

The productivity chart proudly displays the farm's yields.

We take shelter in the living room of one of the farm workers.

She tells us about the bitter cold winters,

hot summers, and the backbreaking work in the rice fields.

Her son is fourteen —

small for his age, she admits, but the family has been through hard times.

Her son was born just as the great famine was ending.

Behind her, one of the country's ubiquitous historical melodramas

is playing on TV.

Then she launches into an vivid description of her visits to Pyongyang:

In addition to the mausoleum of the Great Leaders,

I visited the museum of the Revolution,

the amusement park near the Leader's birthplace,

the Revolutionary Martyr's Cemetery,

the Science and Technology museum,

and the Grand People's Study House.

I went everywhere!

Anyone from the provinces who visits the capital comes here first:

the house where Kim Il Sung was born.

The birthplace of the Republic.

This is where it all started, they say.

The Great Leader's training as a revolutionary,

the resistance against the Japanese,

the struggle against the evil landowners and collaborators.

It's a story that's very familiar to people here.

And as Kim Il Sung was the son of an ordinary peasant,

he is also venerated as a role model.

This is a place of pilgrimage year-round.

In the winter, the buildings and grounds are decked in sober white.

During our visit in 2011, we first saw

local visitors wearing brightly colored winter coats, imported from China.

By 2015, the classes of schoolchildren are wearing name-brand sweatpants,

even though their sneakers don't quite yet make the grade.

September brings the color of autumn and a pumpkin on the thatched roof.

“In Pyongyang, everything is bigger, more modern, more beautiful,”

we were told by the woman from the collective farm.

The city has more of everything:

more light, more shops, more food, more housing,

more work, more education, more culture.

Who wouldn't want to live here?

The capital is more than the epicenter of the state, it's an icon.

Our farmer would probably have been told that

these exemplary buildings are home to exemplary citizens —

scientists, soldiers, civil servants.

Some of the most eminent live on the glossy new

Mirae or Future Scientists Street.

For a farmer from a village without so much as a paved road,

this would be an impressive sight.

And the people who live here seem to have plenty of time for leisure activities.

Our visitor from the collective farm couldn't help

but be dazzled by these high-rises,

the most famous of which looks like an atom when viewed from above.

And by the new districts springing up around the city,

built with the labor of the country's soldiers and workers.

But it would be very unlikely that our visitor

would ever set foot in one of these apartments,

reserved for the most worthy citizens.

It's perfectly neat and tidy —

though the residents have fled the camera.

There's a computer, cell phone, books, and a sewing machine.

The balcony offers a view across a city in the midst of a real estate boom.

There's an abundance of color —

quite the contrast to the grey that dominated here just 20 years ago.

This real estate boom has given rise to a black market

in Pyongyang and other large cities.

When the state awards a faithful follower with a new apartment,

they pass on the old one to the highest bidder.

For a choice location, prices can easily top 100,000 dollars.

And only a fraction of that is tax that ends up in state coffers.

Karl Marx might have called this the 'primitive accumulation of capital.'

A visitor's tour might end with a trip to an amusement park or a water park.

One of Kim Jong-un's priorities is building 'playgrounds for the people.'

The entrance fee? equivalent of two euros?

isn't cheap by local standards.

But everyone mingles and enjoys themselves.

Even the adults get into the swing of things.

I came with my group, but I don't know where my coworkers are.

Now, I'm looking for them.

I work at a large coal mine, an hour away from Pyongyang.

I can't come often because of my work.

Today we visited the Great Leaders' mausoleum, so I stopped by here.

I like to come to Pyongyang to relax.

After having fun like this, work comes more easily.

What are you looking at? Go play!

We've never been abroad. But now we have lots of water parks.

Even at home, in our province north of Pyongyang.

We will become the best in the world.

Without anyone's help, just by our own hands.

Any more questions? We're the best!

Some of the rural visitors seem a bit lost in the crowd.

But since many people don't know how to swim, no one really notices.

But on state television nowadays,

people can even tune in to swimming lessons.

The sun is beginning to set.

A good time to visit the city's main amusement park,

beyond Pyongyang's Arch of Triumph.

Like everywhere in North Korea,

filming anything to do with the military is banned,

but hard to avoid, because soldiers are everywhere.

Some might call this nothing but 'bread and circuses.'

But it's far more than that.

There's hardly a North Korean who doesn't dream of living in Pyongyang.

And every resident of Pyongyang is terrified of

being expelled from the city for some foolish mistake —

forcing them and their family to live in exile,

for a few years or for the rest of their lives,

in a place where they will have less of everything.

With its lights and sights Pyongyang inspires loyalty.

People flock to the parks and swimming pools to enjoy

what is the most attractive city in the country.

And even the world —

for the people who live here at least,

since their world ends at the North Korean border.

We've never witnessed a birth in North Korea,

but we have seen plenty of weddings.

Or wedding 'preparations,' to be more precise.

Like this professional photo-shoot,

where the happy couple is posing in front of Pyongyang's most iconic locations.

It's monsoon season, which means 38 degrees Celsius and very humid.

The bride and groom first went to statues of the Great Leaders.

Then we came the flower park you see here, near the water fountains.

Soldiers usually like to pose in front of military monuments,

like the Monument to the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War.

What the wedding video doesn't show are

the many people who helped make this happy event possible.

In North Korea, most marriages are arranged through matchmakers.

It's their job to find the ideal marriage partner who

will also be suitable to the families.

Although marrying for love is just starting to trend,

arranged marriages are still the norm.

One result is that people usually marry within their own social class.

For many decades,

the country's elite was dominated by the revolutionary comrades of Kim Il-sung,

and their descendants.

At the bottom of the social order were the families of people who

had collaborated with Japan,

and their descendants.

In between were some forty sub-classes,

who were not permitted to marry outside their rank.

The end of Kim Il-Sung's regime, the famine under Kim Jong-Il,

and the partial disintegration of both state and party that followed

not only shook the country, but also its traditional social hierarchy.

This helped loosen the stringent marriage rules.

Today the most desirable professions for a husband are

scientist, diplomat, the military,

and, of course, business professionals.

For years, women traffic police were highly sought after on the marriage market.

But they're seen less often now, with the installation of traffic lights.

Young couples are expected to have children.

And their education will be put in the hands of the state at an early age.

The country boasts a reported literacy rate of 100 percent —

a success that is attributed to the revolution.

The most important school subjects are math, physics, music and singing,

Korean, and the lives of the Great Leaders.

From kindergarten on, children are subjected to a rigorous selection process.

The best students spend their holidays taking part in

sports at the young pioneer camps.

When we arrive at the stadium, the competition is underway.

Each side is cheering on its team.

The young charges aren't wearing the standard lapel pins

bearing images of the Great Leaders.

They're on holiday, and children under 16 aren't obliged to wear them.

Then it's time for the tug-of-war.

The evil American soldier in the middle is tough.

He's already made it through several tournaments.

Finding a good husband, having a successful career —

these topics are far more interesting to most North Koreans than

the endless propaganda they're exposed to.

Getting married is important, and it's also the focus of

the sitcoms that are broadcast on a giant screen near the central railway station.

Locals stand here to watch them in the middle of December,

even in a chilly minus 15 degrees Celsius.

There's also an ad for automaker Pyeonghwa, which means “peace” in Korean.

The company was founded by Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church,

but has been fully owned by the state since 2013.

The sitcoms portray a politically correct world.

The individual matters only as part of the collective,

where being a good worker is what counts.

In the winter, everyone is responsible for a stretch of road.

No matter how much snow has fallen, it has to be cleared.

That's why scenes of people scraping snow and ice off their patch of road

before heading off to the office are a common sight in the winter.

For some unknown reason,