There are a number of films and movies on the topic of North Korea, some of which are excellent, others of which leave a lot to be desired. NK News intern Nicolle Loughlin spent some time identifying those which are currently hosted on Youtube, and we now present a list of North Korea related films which you may find of interest.
Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story
NK News Rating: 4 Stars
In November, 1977, 13-year-old Megumi Yokota was walking home from school when she vanished. For 20 years, her parents had no idea where she was or even if she was alive. One day, the whole world learned the shocking truth: Megumi had been abducted by North Korean secret agents. What begins as a simple missing persons case turns into a battle between two nations as Megumi’s parents turn their personal tragedy into a public campaign to bring their daughter home. Called, “spine-tingling” by the Los Angeles Times and “Engrossing” by the New York Times, this tale of mystery, espionage and deceit is also a testimony to a parents’ love for their child and the lengths they’re willing to go to reunite their family. Winner of numerous film festival awards and hailed by critics, this film will make you hug your loved ones tighter as you sit on the edge of your seat hoping for a happy ending for Megumi’s parents. Executive Producer of this film is Jane Campion, the Oscar-winning director of “The Piano”.
A State of Mind
NK News Rating = 5 Stars
As the United States confronts North Korea over its impending resumption of nuclear weapons production, North Koreans prepare to celebrate the 50th anniversary of their supposed “victory” over the South in the Korean War. This documentary tells the story of two teenage girls and their families as the girls prepare to participate in this year’s Mass Games, an intricately choreographed display of dancers, acrobats, and karate-chopping soldiers, celebrating North Korea’s statehood.
BBC Newsnight on North Korea
NK News Rating: 3 Stars
At the hotel our government minders had booked rooms alongside ours, and on the one occasion that we tried to leave without them we were reported and reprimanded.
From exchanges with our minders, we also learned that our rooms were bugged.
But then we were not being singled out, the entire country lives in a bubble of unreality, cut off from the outside world and watched by an army of informers.
There are only two mobile phone networks. The diplomatic corps and NGO workers use one of them to contact one another.
A relatively small elite of North Koreans use the other system, but this still denies them access to foreigners inside the country and to anyone outside.
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He proudly represented North Korea in the world cup. Yet Jong Tae Se was born and raised in Japan. He represents a 600 000 strong community of Korean descendents for whom Kim Jong-Il can do no wrong.
Children of the Secret State
NK News Rating = 3 Stars
North Korea, a country of 22 million. Up to 3 million of its’ people have starved to death in the last 10 years. More than 40% of North Korean children now suffer from chronic malnutrition. Children of the Secret State is an investigation into North Korea, considered by many as the last Stalinist dictatorship, a hidden and sealed country riddled with propaganda and saturated with hostility to democracy and the West. Joe Layburn and the Hardcash team discovered a young North Korean, known by the pseudonym Ahn Chol, who has been filming undercover so that the world can see what is going on in his native land: the country where his parents both starved to death.
His devastating footage shows some of the estimated 200,000 street children, mainly orphans, foraging for food in the mud and the gutters, ignored by the adults around them and ignored by the state which claims they are at its bosom.
CNN Presents: Undercover in a Secret State
NK News Rating: 4 Stars
Award-winning filmmaker Kim Jung Eun (Shadows and Whispers: The Struggle of North Korean Refugees) lays bare the cruel realities of daily life in North Korea, presenting powerful undercover footage and interviews with defectors fleeing the regime. Working as secret cameramen, the dissidents that Jung Eun meets film public executions and concentration camps to expose the subjugated existence of a nation gripped by the cult of its reclusive leader, Kim Jong Il.
Crossing
NK News Rating: 4 Stars
Yong-soo lives in a small coal-mine village in North Korea with his wife and young son. Although living in extreme poverty, the family is happy just to be with each other. Then one day, Yong-soo’s pregnant wife becomes critically ill. Let alone medicine, Yong-soo can’t even find food for her in North Korea. So he secretly crosses the borders of China hoping to find the medicine for his wife. After many life threatening moments in China, Yong-soo is forced into South Korea, becoming an unwanted refugee prohibited to return to his family. Meanwhile, his wife passes away leaving their young son alone in desperation. With no one to turn to, his young son sets out to find his father not knowing where or how to find him.
Crossing Heaven’s Border
NK News Rating: 2 Stars
Crossing Heaven’s Border reveals the plight of North Korean defectors from the point of view of intrepid South Korean journalists who risk their lives filming undercover for ten months to capture the haunting stories first-hand. The reporters introduce us to a mother working in China as a tour guide to support her six-year-old son who is sick with cerebral palsy and in dire need of medical attention. And we follow the grueling ten-day journey of a teenage girl and a little boy smuggled overland across China and Laos into Thailand, where North Korean defectors can request asylum at the South Korean embassy.
Crossing the Line
NK News Rating: 5 Stars
Crossing the Line (Korean: 푸른 눈의 평양시민, A Blue-Eyed Pyongyang Citizen in North Korea) is a 2006 British documentary film by Daniel Gordon and Nicholas Bonner.
The film is about a former U.S. Army soldier, James J. Dresnok, who defected to North Korea on August 15, 1962. The film was directed and produced by British filmmakers Daniel Gordon and Nicholas Bonner, and was shown at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. The film, which was narrated by actor Christian Slater, was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the festival.
Decades Apart – North Korea
NK News Rating = 3.5 Stars
The June summit between Kim Dae Jung and Kim Jong Il gave millions of Koreans hope of reunification. “One day I got a call saying my brother was going into the [North Korean] army. I saw him at the train station… and I haven’t seen him since”.
This documentary highlights the culture gap growing between North and South.
Defilada
NK News Rating: 3.5 Stars
Film ukazuje Koreańską Republikę Ludowo-Demokratyczną w momencie obchodów 40. rocznicy jej istnienia w 1988 r. Uroczystości zbiegły się w czasie z olimpiadą w Seulu. Władze komunistyczne postawiły sobie za cel zorganizowanie święta narodowego tak, by siłą wyrazu i rozmachem przyćmiło światowe święto sportu.
Rewelacyjny film Andrzeja Fidyka. Udostępniam, bo praktycznie jest niedostępny. Film został nakręcony w 1988, wydano go w 1989 r. Niestety w dostępnej kopii brakuje kilkudziesięciu sekund na początku filmu i ok. 5 minut końcówki filmu.
Dictature, paranoïa, famine: bienvenue en Coree du Nord
NK News Rating: 3 Stars
La Corée du Nord reste la dernière dictature communiste au monde. Dans ce pays, rien n’a changé depuis la prise de pouvoir de Kim Il-Sung, son «fondateur», en 1953. A l’heure actuelle, les 23 millions d’habitants vivent dans une misère totale, à l’intérieur de frontières infranchissables. Un groupe de Français a néanmoins décidé d’y passer ses vacances : 8500 euros les trois semaines pour une nourriture rationnée, un hébergement dépourvu de tout confort et des moyens de transport hors d’âge. Claude, Henri, Jacqueline et les autres membres du groupe découvrent des villes sans voitures, des magasins sans marchandises, mais aussi la surveillance permanente de leurs guides, la propagande omniprésente et les hommages forcés à Kim Il-Sung, lequel s’est éteint depuis ce reportage – il est mort en décembre 2011.
Disillusioned Defectors – South Korea
NK News Rating = 4 Stars
Fleeing starvation and a brutal military regime, defectors crossing from North Korea to the south were once national heroes. But they feel
increasingly like outcasts, finding it impossible to fit into modern, capitalist society.
Kim Hyung Duk escaped from North Korea at the age of 20, his body covered with torture scars from North Korean police. But once in the south he found the alien culture and indifference of the authorities too much to bear. He was caught at the port of Ulsan stowed away on a ship bound for China, trying to go home. Defectors such as the Cho family enjoy luxuries unheard of in the north yet are regarded with suspicion by neighbours for the support they receive from the government. Others such as Kim Young Seh hold a burden of guilt. The wife he left behind in the north was forced to marry someone else. Unusually, Dr Lee Keum admits publicly that the government is not as keen on reunification as it once was. However, South Koreans are becoming less eager to take on the burden of their northern neighbours.
Famine – North Korea
NK News Rating =4 Stars
Mark Davis reports on the devastating famine in North Korea of 1997, confirming the extent of the food crisis, and that international aid did not get through to the people who need it most.
He captures a rare insight into the negotiations between CARE and the government Relief Committee, who complain CARE is not helping enough. The obsessively secretive government wants to direct all aid to the fertile rice bowl areas around the capital, because productivity here is highest. Then they will then be able to feed the starving in the country’s north. Williamson disagrees and is granted a rare permit to travel north to judge for himself. The team break the schedule and visit a nursery of their choosing. Here the hungry children are lacklustre and silent. Officially banned from filming in hospitals, desperate doctors allow the camera in. Hungry mothers are supposed to supply food for their children. A family with no men starve more than their more productive neighbours. If you don’t work, it seems, you don’t eat. This is no socialist famine. The government says the north is not a farming area and shouldn’t get aid first. CARE says aid should go to the starving.
NK News Rating:
FOCAL POINT trains its lens on one of the 15,000 North Korean defectors who have made it to South Korea. Twenty-year-old Haejung (not her real name) was smuggled out of North Korea some years ago in the hope of a better life — leaving her family behind. She now attends Hangyeore High School, a special boarding school an hour outside of Seoul, founded in 2006 to help North Korean teens adjust to life in the South. Most of the school’s 240 students are separated from one or both of their parents back in the North, with little hope of ever seeing them again. They experience severe culture shock transitioning from one of the world’s most isolated Communist states to one of the most technologically and economically advanced societies. The school tries to fill both the emotional void and the cultural gaps. The students eat, sleep, and study on campus. The teachers live with them in the dorms, and many have training as therapists to provide psychological counseling. The curriculum includes everything from history to English to learning how to use a cell phone, computer or credit card. In Field Trip to the DMZ, the students make their annual trip to the border, and Haejung dreams of a time when her family and her homelands will be reunited.
Friends of Kim
NK News Rating: 5 Stars
North Korea is the country many love to hate. Declared as a nation on the axis of evil by George W. Bush but embraced by an international delegation of friends: the Korean Friendship Association.They set out for a march through North Korea. Its aim: to show solidarity with the regime and the North Korean people. The authorities even allowed some US citizens in and an American journalist from ABC.
This ‘International March for Korea’s Peace and Reunification’ is organised by the KFA, the Korean Friendship Association; a worldwide group of supporters of North Korea. Its leader is a 29 year old Spanish citizen, Alejandro Cao de Benos de Les y Perez. Originating from an aristocratic family he heads an organization with mainly young members who are fed up with the consumerism of the Western world.
In 12 days the 22 participants of the march travel through a country full of monuments, propaganda and poverty. Friends of Kim is a film about idealism, trust and crime. What begins as a magical mystery tour ends in a road to claustrophobia.
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A family living in a cave in North Korea sends their children to a Chinese orphanage, the parents’ best hope for providing better nutrition and an education.
A couple is hiding under floorboards of a family in China. They’ve given all their savings to smugglers who have promised to bring their only child out of North Korea.
group of young boys beg and steal money in China to help their families in North Korea.
Inside Undercover North Korea
NK News Rating: 3 Stars
Being desperate living in the communist state, many North Koreans including children take risks to flee into their neighboring countries- China, South Korea, Thailand…where some of the escapers work as prostitutes earning some money or others being as slumdogs hiding in caves and abandoned buildings from NK spies.
Joe Dresnok: An American in North Korea
NK News Rating: 4 Stars
Dresnok told his story to two British filmmakers, Dan Gordon and Nick Bonner, who have made a documentary called, “Crossing The Line.” They had already made two documentaries in North Korea—one on that country’s soccer team; and another on star gymnasts training for North Korea’s annual spectacle called the Mass Games.
Dresnok justifies his reasons to defect and explains how the North Korea government cares for him.
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In the DMZ separating North and South Korea, two North Korean soldiers have been killed, supposedly by one South Korean soldier. But the 11 bullets found in the bodies, together with the 5 remaining bullets in the assassin’s magazine clip, amount to 16 bullets for a gun that should normally hold 15 bullets. The investigating Swiss/Swedish team from the neutral countries overseeing the DMZ suspects that another, unknown party was involved – all of which points to some sort of cover up. The truth is much simpler and much more tragic.
NK News Rating: 4 Stars
Kimjongilia is a flower named after North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. It is a hybrid cultivar of tuberous begonia. This documentary by N.C. Heikin’s is a documentary about the experiences of North Korean refugees and of those who managed to escape from Kim Jong Il’s concentration camps.
Kim Jong-il’s Foreign Adventure
NK News Rating:
“You should see their way of living. They live in smelly barns in multiples of ten,” a Russian police chief tells us as he drives towards the Korean village. Speaking to the Korean loggers as they take a cigarette break the picture is painted in even starker terms: “What he’s saying here is that the majority of workers have a ten-year plus labour commitment to live and work in the middle of nowhere for almost no pay.” So why do they do it? As ever the North Korea propoganda machine is present to remind the workers of the ‘home land’ and the wise teachings of Kim Jong-Il and his father Kim Il Sung. A sign at the town reads: “Kim Il Sung lives with us forever.” Yet travelling into one of the strangest of North Korea’s frontiers, it is clear that the hermit kingdom’s isolationist tactics are not paying off in these camps. Will new leader Kim Jong-un continue the bizarre experiment?
Kim Jong-il: The Forbidden Biography
NK News Rating:
He is the most secretive political leader on earth. A grotesque dictator with the finger on the nuclear trigger. But since 2008, Kim Jong Il knows he’s dying. The tyrant has started a race against the clock to perpetuate his regime. A mad bet which might well impact the world’s peace.
Starting from a personality profile through exclusive testimonies, this film offers a geopolitical analysis of the Korean peninsula based on first hand Russian, Chinese and Korean archive footage.
Kim’s Nuclear Gamble
NK News Rating: 2 Stars
”Kim’s Nuclear Gamble” traces the highs, lows, and crisis points during the past decade of U.S.-North Korean relations, beginning with Pyongyang’s announcement in 1994 that it planned to reprocess fuel from its nuclear reactor at Yongbyon — a move that would have given North Korea enough plutonium to make five to six nuclear bombs.
“We were willing to risk war,” former U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry tells FRONTLINE. “We seriously considered solving the problem directly by simply striking the reactor and processor at Yongbyon.”
NK News Rating:
The number of North Koreans defecting to South Korea has surged in recent times.
More than 10,000 have defected in the last three years alone, escaping economic hardship and suffering in the isolated regime. But many defectors have trouble adjusting to their new lives in the South.
On this edition of 101 East, we look at a school that is trying to help young defectors start new lives in modern South Korea.
Living Hell
NK News Rating: 3 Stars
We return to the tragic story of the Kim family — forced to give their children up to orphanages to escape hunger and the deprivation of living beneath the ground. The Kim’s hoped to seek assylum, however, seven months after we last met them, the Kims were arrested thanks to an informer and forcibly returned to North Korea.
National Geographic – Inside Undercover in North Korea
NK News Rating =2 Stars
Join National Geographic’s Lisa Ling as she captures a rare look inside North Korea – something few Americans have ever been able to do. Posing as an undercover medical coordinator and closely guarded throughout her trip, Lisa moves inside the most isolated nation in the world, encountering a society completely dominated by government and dictatorship. Glimpse life inside North Korea as you’ve never seen before with personal accounts and powerful footage. Witness first-hand efforts by humanitarians and the challenges they face from the rogue regime.
Nordkorea – Einblicke in ein Verschlossenes Land
NK News Rating: Unrated
Die Demokratische Volksrepublik Korea, weithin Nordkorea genannt, ist ein Staat in Ostasien. Nordkorea umfasst den nördlichen Teil der Koreanischen Halbinsel und ist nach dem Zusammenfall des Ostblocks einer der wenigen verbliebenen stalinistischen Staaten. Das Land wird diktatorisch regiert und gilt als das weltweit restriktivste politische System der Gegenwart. Diese Dokumentation erlaut einen Einblick in das Landesinnere.
Nordkorea – Kims Reich – Unterwegs in Nordkorea
NK News Rating: Unrated
Nordkorea ist das letzte Beispiel des real existierenden Kommunismus. Sein Herrscher Kim Jong II machte Schlagzeilen mit dem Austritt aus dem Atomsperrvertrag. Der amerikanische Präsident George W. Bush zählt das Land zur “Achse des Bösen”. Wenige konnten sich bis jetzt ein eigenes Bild von Nordkorea machen. Theo Stich war Mitglied einer Schweizer Reisegruppe, die das abgeschottete Land im letzten Herbst erstmals besuchen konnte.
North Korea: Access to Evil
NK News Rating: 3 Stars
Hundreds of thousands of people are imprisoned without charge. It’s not because they have committed a crime. It is because their relatives are believed to be critical of the regime and so they are punished. According to President Kim Jong Il, the bad blood and seed of any dissident must be rooted out down to three generations. Forced labour and starvation rations ensure that prisoners do not escape. Those who try to are publicly executed. But this is not the North Korea the government wants the world to see. The authorities go to great lengths to equip all foreign intruders with “minders” and monitor their every move.
The This World team were scrupulously guarded. The answers could only be found outside North Korea itself. Reporter, Olenka Frenkiel, hears testimonies from victims of the secret camps who have since fled to South Korea or the United States. And most shocking of all, she tracks down one of the perpetrators. Kwon Hyok, a former North Korean army intelligence officer, was also chief guard at “Prison Camp no. 22″. For the first time on camera, he describes specially-made glass gas chambers used for human experimentation.
This World asks: if a deal is reached with North Korea about its nuclear weapons, should it be allowed to keep their gas chambers?
North Korea: A Day in the Life
NK News Rating: 5 Stars
This film presents an ordinary North Korean family’s daily life. You will see how typical North Koreans view Americans in general.
Filmed around Pyongyang focusing on propaganda about North Korean daily life, it’s idealism and the happiness of the North Korea people.
North Korea: Beyond the DMZ
NK News Rating: 4 Stars
While this tiny state on the divided Korean peninsula is continually demonized in America, few have any first hand knowledge of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. What is it like on the other side of the 38th parallel? How do Koreans in the North view this past decade with the fall of Soviet communism, natural disasters that brought famine and power shortages, and a continued, dangerously hostile relationship with the U.S.? What are the concerns of the Korean American community many of whom have family in the north? This documentary follows a young Korean American woman to see her relatives, and through unique footage of life in the D.P.R.K. and interviews with ordinary people and scholars, opens a window into this nation and its people.
North Korea’s Cinema of Dreams
NK News Rating:
North Korean leader Kim Jong Il’s love of film is well-documented, but few outsiders know that he is revered as a genius of cinema by his own people. On this episode of 101 East we gain a rare insight into the beating heart of North Korea’s film industry.
North Korea – Desperate or Deceptive
NK News Rating: 3 Stars
This unique documentary takes a rare glimpse into the changing face of life in North Korea. The film, which features candid interviews with teachers, doctors, principals and students, probes into this closed society like never before to examine it’s changing social, political and economic landscape. The program also features a survivor of a North Korean gulag who fled to South Korea… and a current military officer who defends the need to pay for a nuclear armed military at the expense of economic development.
North Korean Film Madness
NK News Rating: 3 Stars
You could say that North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il has two primary obsessions: maintaining nuclear weapons capability as a means of protecting his “hermit kingdom,” and thwarting pressure from outside forces like America and the rest of the industrialized world to open his country to modern things like electricity… and he’s obsessed with film. He loves movies. It’s rumored that he has one of the largest private film collections in the world. His favorite film is Gone with the Wind and his favorite actress is Elizabeth Taylor. He’s a film collector and bona fide cinephile, but he’s much more. He’s everything really. He’s a director, a producer, a financier, a costume maker, set designer, screenwriter, cameraman, sound engineer… and he’s also a film theorist. His masterwork on aesthetics and practice is “On the Art of Cinema” (written and published in the early 1970s). In it he gives himself the humble title, “Genius of the Cinema.” He built an extensive film studio in Pyongyang and when he couldn’t find someone to make his film he did what any self-respecting eternal leader and great president would do… he kidnapped one.
North Korean Guys
NK News Rating: 3 Stars
Hard-nosed North Korean naval officer Choi Baek-doo (Jung Joon-ho) and his light-hearted sergeant Lim Dong-hae (Gong Hyung-jin) go on a fishing trip in the Sea of Japan (East Sea). The pair fall asleep in their boat and are violently awoken by a squall. Clinging to their tiny craft, they struggle to survive the storm. By the time the storm passes, they have been washed deep into South Korean borders. Realizing their plight, they conceal their boat and explore their surroundings.
They are continually shocked by the culture of South Korea, but eventually recover their bearings and befriend a girl, Han Nara (Ryoo Hyun-kyung). Unfortunately for the sailors trapped in enemy territory, Nara is a runaway and her father is a police chief, which only makes it more difficult for them to blend in. After their repeated attempts to escape fail, they enter a talent contest in order to win the first place prize: a trip to Kumgang Mountain, North Korea.
North Korea’s lifeline – Japan
NK News Rating =3.5 Stars
Despite its insularity, North Korea is successfully exporting its fanaticism through half a million expatriates living in capitalist Japan. Chongryun, the Workers Party of North Korea, is meeting in Tokyo. It’s easy to imagine we are in the heart of North Korea as over 10,000 fiercely patriotic members come together to celebrate the dictator Kim Jong II’s party leadership. Commitment to the cause starts young thanks to the Party schools run outside the jurisdiction of Japanese education authorities. This is the first time that the Northern Korean community has allowed any Western media to film inside their schools. Taught in Korean with censored North Korean text books, these children will never hear any criticism of their homeland. We follow eighteen year old Jong Ryol and his classmates as they prepare for their graduation visit to the North Korean capital, Pyongyang: a school trip into a country still considered hostile to the outside world, but for these students, a journey “home”. Jong Ryol returns from his trip with a glowing report Yet the bulk of funding from Japan does not come from patriotic ex-pats. Most of Japan’s 18,000 gambling parlours are owned by Koreans with an estimated $250 billion turnover. While North Koreans overlook their leaders’s autocratic ways, it seems he turns a blind eye to the origin of the money his regime receives.
North Korea: Nuclear Nightmare
NK News Rating: 3 Stars
North Korea (officially the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea or DPRK) is claimed to have an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, and claims to possess nuclear weapons. The CIA asserts that North Korea also has a substantial arsenal of chemical weapons. North Korea was a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty but withdrew in 2003, citing the failure of the United States to fulfill its end Agreed Framework, a 1994 agreement between the states to limit North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, begin normalization of relations, and help North Korea supply some energy needs through nuclear reactors.
North Korean Refugees
NK News Rating =3 Stars
They risk all trying to make it across the North Korean border to China, only to find no guarantee of a better life. At constant risk of being deported, these refugees live a half life in the shadows.
“I thought if I came to China life would be better”, laments one woman. “I was wrong”. Without Chinese language skills, most North Korean refugees remain at risk of being discovered by the police. “The police pay 200 yuan to anyone who discloses the whereabouts of North Koreans”, explains one refugee. “That’s what I’m most afraid of. I’m always hiding”. Easy prey for the unscrupulous, they’re forced to do dangerous jobs for little money. “Most North Korean women fall into the hands of human traffickers”, states activist Tim Peters. “They’re sold into prostitution”. Unlike other countries, China classes North Korean refugees as economic migrants. If caught, they face return to Pyongyang and almost certain execution. “North Koreans are being sent back by the hundreds”, complains Peters. Without external pressure, the situation for these refugees is unlikely to improve. Their only hope is that scrutiny surrounding the 2008 Beijing Olympics will encourage China to change its policy.
North Korea: Shadows and Whispers
NK News Rating: 3.5 Stars
As many as 800,000 North Koreans have crossed illegally into China in search of food. This is their story. It is told from hideouts under the ground, under floorboards, behind closed doors. Living in a world where the Chinese police can knock at the door any minute and send them home to near certain execution. They cling to what it means to be a human being and struggling with the guilt of leaving their starving loved ones behind.
North Korea: Suspicious Minds
NK News Rating: 3.5 Stars
Their journey begins on a rainy day in South Korea at “the absurdly named demilitarized zone, one of the most heavily armed places on earth,” according to reporter Ben Anderson. An American soldier takes Anderson and Daws on a tour of the border that has divided the Korean peninsula since the end of World War II — and that is a last vestige of the Cold War. The soldier points out North Korean “jammers,” which block foreign radio and television broadcasts. “So they have no idea of what actually goes on in the outside world,” says the soldier. “They think that a BMW is manufactured by North Korea.”
Before leaving for North Korea, Anderson meets in Seoul with a group of North Korean refugees who had fled from famine and political repression. “The moment a child utters a word they start him on ideological training,” one refugee says. “So they can’t think for themselves.”
North Korea, The Border and The War
NK News Rating: 3.5 Stars
North Korea continues to be described as a hermetically closed, paranoid, unpredictable country. Its great Leader, Kim Jong Il, son of Kim Il Sung, goes on living happily in the only communist dynasty left. After India, Israel, Pakistan and Iran, a new atomic power is seriously baring its teeth. Our documentary aims at shedding light on a the real stakes of an uneasily decipherable crisis, even for experts on the situation. A crisis in the region that President Clinton once called “the most dangerous place in the world”. The film will highlight the current context, the relations, tensions and dangers between both Koreas, but also the U.S., China, Russia and Japan.
North Korea: The Juche Era
NK News Rating: 3.5 Stars
Just what does make North Korea tick? In every sense the country and its people still see themselves at war. Isolated and ostracised for decades, everything in this quirky place is choreographed to display maximum unity and strength. Produced by Bulgarian TV this unseen film manages to travel throughout the country. It provides an enthralling and unique behind the scenes view of a country which rarely allows outsiders to see inside.
North Korea Theme Park 1984
NK News Rating: 4 Stars
Themepark 1984 is a documentary of North Korea. It takes an evolutionary view of the sad subject, and lightens it with dark and polemic humor. It was filmed during the 60th birthday of the Democratic Republic of Korea in September 2008. The film visits Pyongyang, the radio active spa hotel, Sinchan massacre museum with the worst anti-US propaganda ever seen, a themepark, the DMZ, and the massive Arirang stadium. It also reviews the North Korean ideologies and its “Great Leaders”. Actual propaganda films were acquired from North Korea, and some footage is included in the documentary. The film is a travel documentary, informative documentary (e.g., food crisis and collapsed economy) and a humorous critique through the eyes of a Westerner (e.g, examining the Juche ideology). Beware: contains polemic ideas, and thought crimes.
Nuclear Nightmare: Understanding North Korea
NK News Rating: 3 Stars
Nuclear Nightmare examines the man behind the current nuclear crisis, Kim Jong Il, and the country he rules over with an iron fist. The one-hour documentary, produced by New York Times Television for the Discovery Channel, explores how Kim Jong Il, one of the last of the old style communist rulers, came to power, and how he has survived into the 21st century despite the enormous hardships and deprivation the people of North Korea have suffered, including a widespread famine in which more than a million citizens starved to death. North Korea, a nation imprisoned by poverty and with a population so hungry, people eat bugs and grass. Now this megalomaniacal dictator is holding the civilized world hostage with what many see as a cunning strategy of extortion, threatening to develop an arsenal of nuclear weapons. It’s a strategy by which the United States has indicated it cannot abide.
Parallel Universe – North Korea
NK News Rating =3 Stars
How do North Koreans feel about their country’s nuclear ambitions and their place in the world? This rare report from inside Pyongyang provides a rare insight into the mindset of North Koreans.
Is Pyongyang really prepared to demolish its Yongbyun nuclear facility? At the demilitarized zone in North Korea, a military officer explain why his country needs nuclear weapons.
Peter Han’s Visiting his Separated Family in North Korea
NK News Rating: 3 Stars
When I went to North Korea, I take pictures. And then I made documentary. Directed by Ik Jea Song.
Return to the Border
NK News Rating: 4 Stars
Director Zhao Liang was born in China, near the border with North Korea. Until the 1990s, these two socialist states were allies and both dictatorships actively cooperated with each other across their borders. But then China concluded a trade treaty with South Korea. The people suddenly became enemies. Trade and cooperation was terminated and a difficult battle for subsistence began. Traveling along the river that separates the two countries, the filmmaker examines what is left of the socialist dreams on both sides of the water. A Chinese man who used to live in North Korea reveals the connection between leader Kim Il Sung’s death in 1994 and the famine of 1995. Across the river, North Korean border guards are on patrol. In winter, they cross the frozen river to accept Chinese goods; during the summer, they obtain the articles with pulleys. The film shows how it is possible for similar people and destinies to be forcibly plunged into opposite camps. We get a sense of the current problems facing China as it prepares to become a world economic leader, and at the same time feel that survival is a more important issue than ideology in North Korea right now.
Secret Reunion
NK News Rating: 4 Stars
Ji-won is one of the North Korean Assassins who lives in South Korea as a ordinary citizen, until their calling: the assassination of Kim Jung-Il’s second cousin who wrote a book that North Korea’s Government deemed as a great betrayal to North Korea. However, one of the members betrays his orders to find a new life in South Korea, and Ji-won mistakenly becomes the target for both countries.
Seoul Train
NK News Rating: 4 Stars
SEOUL TRAIN, the gripping documentary exposé into the life-and-death struggle faced by North Korean refugees as they flee their homeland through China. SEOUL TRAIN combines vérité and hidden camera footage with personal stories and interviews to reveal the harrowing journey attempted by some 250,000 North Koreans, whose refugee status is not recognized by China. Their clandestine escape covers hundreds of miles of Chinese territory via an “underground railroad” of safe houses and hidden routes. If caught, the refugees – and the activists that help them – face imprisonment and possibly execution if captured and returned to North Korea. With rare and candid interviews with U.N., U.S., South Korean and Chinese officials, SEOUL TRAIN skillfully explores the geopolitical forces behind this crisis – with a human face.
Seven Days in North Korea
NK News Rating: 2 Stars
David Pluth takes an official journalistic trip to North Korea and films his trip with his official guides.
The Hermit Kingdom
NK News Rating: 3 Stars
This is a rare look inside North Korea, part of what President Bush calls, “the axis of evil.” Dan Rather’s visit includes a stop at the USS Pueblo. The Pueblo was seized by North Koreans in 1968, and its crew was beaten and tortured. Now the ship is a tourist attraction in an isolated country some call “The Hermit Kingdom.”
The Game of their Lives
NK News Rating: 5 Stars
A rare documentary about the 1966 World Cup North Korea team that exceeded expectations. Director Daniel Gordon enters the intriguing nation, meets the remaining squad players and coach, and brings them back to Middlesbrough where the locals gave them great support all those years ago. Even if you are not a fan of football, this is a fascinating programme about a fascinating country and its heroes.
The Great Escape – North Korea
NK News Rating =3 Stars
Up to 300,000 North Koreans may have fled to China, only to find their poverty and persecution continues. Secret filming reveals the plight of these refugees as they then try to flee to the West.
The Journals of Musan
NK News Rating: 3.5 Stars
Park Jungbum’s stunning and much-lauded debut is the story of a North Korean defector forging a life in capitalist South Korea. As both director and actor, Park (assistant director of Lee Chang-dong’s stirring Poetry) fully realizes a disarmingly beautiful vision of loneliness, disconnect, and ethical ambiguity in this story of a lost soul’s struggle to connect.
NK News Rating: 3.5 Stars
Jim Finn’s THE JUCHE IDEA is an uproarious and provocative deconstruction of North Korean propaganda and philosophy. Mixing together eye-popping archival footage with deadpan re-enactments, Finn has created a complex docu-fiction that is equally thought-provoking and entertaining. Translated as “self-reliance,” Juche (CHOO-chay) is a hybrid of Confucian and Stalinist thought that Kim Jong-il adapted from his father and applied to the entire culture. In THE JUCHE IDEA, a sympathetic South Korean filmmaker visits a North Korean artists’ colony to bring Juche ideas into the 21st century. She ends up producing hilariously stilted shorts, including a nonsensical sci-fi story and the enigmatic DENTURES OF IMPERIALISM. Inspired by the true story of how a South Korean director was kidnapped in the 1970s to invigorate the North’s movie industry, THE JUCHE IDEA is both sardonic satire and historical excavation, an exuberant collage that reveals the absurdity at the heart of Kim-Jong-il’s regime.
NK News Rating:
This documentary offers a comprehensive overview of the North Korean people’s crisis, featuring interviews with North Korean refugees who have escaped, their journey to freedom, expert analysis, and insight into some of the little-known grass-roots changes that are happening inside the country.
The Red Chapel
NK News Rating: 2 Stars
A journalist with no scruples, a spastic, and a comedian travel to North Korea with a mission – to challenge the conditions of the smile in one of the world’s most notorious regimes. The Red Chapel chronicles the amusing and often bizarre encounters between this Danish theatre troupe and their North Korean hosts in a one of a kind, East-meets-West-meets-East look at cultural exchange in the modern world’s last anti-globalist bastion.
The Secret Life of Kim Jong-il
NK News Rating:
Discovery’s Secret Life of Kim Jong il interview North Korean refugees including ones who stood right by Kim Jong il’s side. The Documentary ends with more secrets involved in electing Kim Jong il’s son Kim Jong un as North Korea’s ‘Great Successor’.
The Vice Guide to North Korea
NK News Rating: 3 Stars
Getting into North Korea was one of the hardest and weirdest processes VICE has ever dealt with. After we went back and forth with their representatives for months, they finally said they were going to allow 16 journalists into the country to cover the Arirang Mass Games in Pyongyang. Then, ten days before we were supposed to go, they said, “No, nobody can come.” Then they said, “OK, OK, you can come. But only as tourists.” We had no idea what that was supposed to mean. They already knew we were journalists, and over there if you get caught being a journalist when you’re supposed to be a tourist you go to jail. We don’t like jail. And we’re willing to bet we’d hate jail in North Korea. But we went for it. The first leg of the trip was a flight into northern China. At the airport, the North Korean consulate took our passports and all of our money, then brought us to a restaurant. We were sitting there with our tour group, and suddenly all the other diners left and these women came out and started singing North Korean nationalist songs. We were thinking, “Look, we were just on a plane for 20 hours. We’re jet-lagged. Can we just go to bed?” but this guy with our group who was from the LA Times told us, “Everyone in here besides us is secret police. If you don’t act excited then you’re not going to get your visa. So we got drunk and jumped up onstage and sang songs with the girls. The next day we got our visas. A lot of people we had gone with didn’t get theirs. That was our first hint at just what a freaky, freaky trip we were embarking on…
Tiger Spirit
NK News Rating: 4 Stars
This full-length documentary tells the story of modern Korea, a nation divided in half. The psychic scar shared by families divided during the Korean War in the 1950s is symbolized by the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) dividing communist North from capitalist South. Along this infamous border, filmmaker Min Sook Lee begins an emotion-charged journey into Korea’s broken heart, exploring the rhetoric and realism of reunification through the extraordinary stories of ordinary people. An eloquent tale of longing and hope, Tiger Spirit is an unforgettable portrait of Korea at a crossroads.
Vitejte v KLDR
NK News Rating: Unrated
Jedna z českých cestovních kanceláří nabízí ve svém katalogu „cestu do neznáma” – poznávací zájezd do Severní Koreje. V roce 2008 to bylo podruhé od roku 1989, kdy do KLDR vstoupila obyčejná česká turistická skupina. Každý z turistů musel přistoupit na fakt, že bude po dobu zájezdu omezena jeho svoboda — nikdo ze skupiny například nemůže „neorganizovaně” opustit hotel nebo dokonce oslovit nějakého „obyčejného” Korejce. Kdo a proč se vydá na dovolenou do země, která je hrozbou pro bezpečnost celého světa? Je pro české cestovatele tento zájezd vzpomínkou na mládí prožité v komunismu, adrenalinovým zážitkem nebo jen neobvyklým způsobem utrácení peněz? Jak se člověk z demokratické země vyrovná s nařízeními a restrikcemi totalitního systému?
Welcome to North Korea
NK News Rating =4 Stars
NK News Rating =4 Stars
The winner of the 2001 International Emmy award for Best Documentary, Welcome to North Korea is a grotesquely surreal look at the all-too-real conditions in modern-day North Korea. Dutch filmmaker Peter Tetteroo and his associate Raymond Feddema spent a week in and around the North Korean capital of Pyongyang — ample time to produce this outstanding film.
Winter Butterfly
NK News Rating: 4 Stars
Head of the household, 11 year-old Jin-ho lives with his sick mother who gathers and sells fire wood. The one thing Jin-ho is most scared about is his mother dying and being left alone in this world. One day he has an argument with her about his friend and goes to the mountains alone to gather wood. However, he has an accident and loses his way. His mother looks for him everywhere but can’t find him. Jin-ho wanders around cold and hunger for several days and manages to come down from the mountains safely. He thought of his loving mother who would be waiting for him at home.
But Jin-ho didn’t know that everything that happened was just the beginning of unhappiness.
Witness: Hana’s Story – Refugee from North Korea
NK News Rating: Unrated
The life of 19-year old Hana, one of a growing number of defectors from North Korea.
Yodok Stories
NK News Rating: 3.5 Stars
Jung Sung San is one out of nine people who have escape North Korea’s concentration camps and managed to flee to “safety” in Seoul. Here he organizes a controversial theatre play about his experiences as prisoner in a concentration camp called Yodok. He inspires eight other refugees to recreate the past, and together they work to develop a musical about the concentration camps.
The film follows the characters through this difficult process. There are many who would like to stop them, and Jung receives several death threats. The film leads us close to the refugees, we participate in their private lives, and we listen to their dramatic stories. Their lives in Seoul are affected by financial difficulties and hostile South Koreans with a negative view on North Korea after years of propaganda. Yodok Story is their only chance to get their story told.
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