This essay compares North Korean cinema’s construction of the North Korean nation-state with the representation of North Korea in other transnational cinemas such as South Korean refugee and Korean Chinese (Chosun-jok) films. North Korea is an ethnocentric country whose slogan is “Our Nation, the First (Uri Minjok Jeiljuyui)” and that refuses transnational capitalism as well as post-communism, unlike Russia or China. However those who have been repressed by the idea of ethnicity, the most important principle for the ethnocentric nation, return from outside of North Korea to interrupt ethnic sentiment. They appear here and there in various films such as Korean Chinese cinema, North Korean refugee cinema, and Korean Japanese cinema. Here, what is important is the gaze of the outsider. This parallax view offers semantic value to the cinematic imagery that circulates around the nation called North Korea. This viewpoint neglected both in North and South Korea offers one possible approach for the comparative study of North and South Korean cinema. For this purpose, we need to explore the specificities of North Korean films, which distinguish them as ‘North Korean’cinema. We need to examine the national ideology pervading the North Korean film arts and the relationship between their ideology and aesthetics. Such a visual topography of nation-state in North Korean cinema is the substructure for post and anti-national cinemas of minorities derived from and scattered by that topography itself. Following this discussion, I will develop the analogy between the inside and outside of the cinematic frame and the inside and outside of North Korea through two key film examples; The Journal of Moosan, The Dooman River. The movement into the nation-state and deviation out of it will be discussed in terms of the rhetoric of ‘on screen’ and ‘off screen.’