The Mole: Undercover in North Korea

Mads Brügger has built a career on documentaries that double as elaborate stunts. For The Ambassador he bought a Liberian diplomatic title to expose the blood-diamond trade; Cold Case Hammarskjöld, which won the directing award for world documentary at Sundance, had him chasing 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 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. For 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 is shaky, often absurd and frequently terrifying, and it 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 governments across Europe responded formally when it was released. It plays as a spy thriller and as a black comedy about the banality of a rogue state's middlemen, and few investigative documentaries of recent years come close to it.