Kim Jong Un enjoys sunset, gallops on horseback in North Korea propaganda doc

The North Korean propaganda film does a great job of highlighting their leader's horseback skills, but ignores his seven recent missile launches.

North Korea’s state media has ushered in the Lunar New Year with a deluge of propaganda videos fawning over Kim Jong Un, including a 110-minute documentary that shows off his horse-riding skills but ignores the leader’s recent spate of missile launches.

In January alone, North Korea held seven sanction-busting missile launches, but the government’s state media would rather you concentrate on Kim’s equestrian skills and how majestic he looks on horseback.

The new film, titled The Great Year of Victory, 2021, was added to the Pyongyang Broadcast Service YouTube channel the week of Feb. 1, alongside a group other videos, including one that shows Kim enjoying a concert with his wife, Ri Sol Ju.

The slew of videos and the tactic to release them around Lunar New Year could be an attempt to highlight Kim’s vim and vigour, Cheong Seong-chang of the Center for North Korea Studies at the Sejong Institute, told AFP.

“The horse-riding scenes, in particular, seem to have been produced to show off his health at home and abroad.”

The documentary is intercut with plenty of artillery footage, and the narrator makes coded reference to North Korea’s “worst difficulties” in 2021.

Some of the footage shows Kim slowly descending a set of makeshift stairs, noticeably slimmer than we’ve seen him in quite some time, while the narrator describes how his “body has been completely withered away” by hard work.

Yang Moo-jin, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies, told AFP that this is a ploy to “humanize” Kim.