The Mole: Undercover in North Korea

Mads Brügger has built a career out of documentaries that are also elaborate stunts. In The Ambassador he bought a Liberian diplomatic title to expose the blood-diamond trade; in Cold Case Hammarskjöld, which won the directing award for world documentary at Sundance, he chased the death of a UN secretary-general. The Mole, co-produced by Denmark's DR, Norway's NRK, Sweden's SVT and the BBC's Storyville strand, and broadcast in October 2020, is his most audacious project — and the one in which he himself is least in control.

Its hero is Ulrich Larsen, a mild-mannered chef who in 2010 volunteered to infiltrate the Korean Friendship Association, a club of Western sympathisers for the Pyongyang regime led by the flamboyant Spaniard Alejandro Cao de Benós. Over ten years Larsen filmed covertly with hidden cameras, gaining the trust of officials in Copenhagen, Pyongyang and beyond, while Brügger recruited Jim Latrache-Qvortrup, a former Foreign Legionnaire with a criminal past, to play a flashy oil investor called Mr James. The footage — shaky, often absurd, frequently terrifying — is cut with Larsen's candid reflections on what the double life cost him and his family.

It won the Robert for Best Documentary and a Grierson Award, and drew formal responses from governments across Europe on its release. Part spy thriller, part black comedy about the banality of a rogue state's middlemen, it is one of the most extraordinary investigative documentaries of recent years.