The Propaganda Game is a 2015 documentary film about North Korea by director Álvaro Longoria.
It was described by The Hollywood Reporter as an "effectively a well-mounted video diary of his short visit to the country" and "inevitably intriguing because of its subject".
Longoria was permitted to film high-quality footage within the country, his visit facilitated and monitored by Alejandro Cao de Benós,[3] the Spanish founder of the Korean Friendship Association who himself becomes a subject of the documentary.
[2] The film, which includes interviews as well as archival and contemporary news footage, attempts to describe the nation's social realities with particular attention to media manipulation by the DPRK government, while also questioning the simplifications and caricatures about North Korea made by foreign observers.
Longoria told Variety that he had deliberately avoided "the typical moving handheld secret look at North Korea", and that he undertook, in the film's striking opening sequence, "to use 'propaganda' aesthetics" and "to shoot North Korea in a way that hasn’t been shown before: as beautiful as possible", with attention to Pyongyang residents enjoying leisurely activities in their city.