The Digital Journalist
© Yannis Kontos/Polaris Images
North Korean workers and students perform during the Arirang Festival at the May Day stadium in Pyongyang, North Korea, Saturday, Oct. 15, 2005. A mass cultural and art festival is part of the 60th anniversary of its ruling Workers' Party of North Korea. Reclusive North Korea allowed American tourists across its border for the first time in three years, in time to take in the spectacle of the country's biggest-ever mass games, involving some 100,000 people. The festival offers an idealized image that North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il hopes to inculcate not only among his own people but also among visitors from elsewhere. The 90-minute show moves from scenes of verdant fields filled with livestock and tractors, to power plants pumping out electricity, to waves of soldiers in battle dress marching in defense of the "socialist paradise."