The new video incorporates imagery from the most recent mass games event, which was staged last September to mark the country's 70th anniversary. It briefly shows troops at attention during a military parade and fighter jets creating smoke trails in the national colours of blue, red and white. But it also is interspersed with shots of civilians marching at the same parade, clips of new high-rise apartments in the capital, Pyongyang, fireworks displays and rows of students in their school uniforms.
Lyrics to Our National Flag have been distributed widely. Large posters showing the flag and the lyrics are being displayed in factories.
The song opens with the lines: As we watch our blue-red banner flying sky high, our hearts are bursting with the blood of patriotism.
We feel the breath of our nation as the flag strongly flaps in the wind.
The flag as important as life carries the fate of our people.
We will love the shining flag of our nation.
Please fly until the end of this world.
A note above one poster seen by the Associated Press urged workers at the Kim Jong Suk Textile Factory in Pyongyang to study the song closely.
Coming after years of what had seemed to be deepening hostility, Kim's outreach to Washington and his Chinese and South Korean neighbours presents a bit of a conundrum for North Korea's propaganda chiefs.
Few details of Kim's negotiations with Trump over the future of North Korea's nuclear arsenal have been made public in the North.
The official media have instead focused on how Kim has been welcomed on the world stage and asserted that he is leading the way to defuse tensions on the Korean Peninsula.
But the nationalist call for unity and the less-militaristic message of the new video are in keeping with an effort in North Korea to dial back its public displays of overtly anti-US propaganda and redirect attention to Kim's current priority of mobilising the entire country behind improving the economy.
Kim unveiled that shift in his New Year's address last year, opening the door to a stunning series of summits with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, South Korean President Moon Jae In and, last June, with Trump in Singapore.
Kim has since made some big strides with Beijing and Seoul toward undercutting support for the US-backed sanctions that have constrained his development plans.
Though little progress has been made on Washington's main concern, denuclearisation, Trump announced during his State of the Union address on Wednesday that he will meet Kim again in Vietnam on February 27 and 28.
- AP
