North Korea at Leisure

You’d be forgiven for not immediately thinking of North Koreans as people enjoying unlimited leisure time. A vicious famine decimated up to a fifth of the population in the Nineties and they live in an dictatorship moulded around the figure of Kim Jung Il.
Yet on a recent, state-managed and highly-restricted tour to the secretive Stalinist state, a Demotix photographer was exposed to repeated set-pieces of people enjoying their free time with a number of different activities: karaoke singing on the beach, impromptu serenades by the river in the capital city Pyongyang, and enjoying a night out at the May Day Stadium to view the world’s largest propaganda spectacle, the Arirang Games.
As the global recession brings about the kind of conditions Marx had envisaged when agitating for his Communist Revolution, here are images proving that living in the world’s last Stalinist stronghold is more fun than it appears... -An official tour-guide leads military officers out of the International Friendship Exhibition Hall, an underground, bomb-proof facility in North Korea’s Mount Myohyang area, containing a quarter of a million presents given to the country’s dictator by international delegations