North Korean film producers are making a new film about the capture of the USS Pueblo – a 1968 incident in which an American naval surveillance vessel and its crew were captured and held hostage for 11 months by the Korean People’s Navy.
The new film has been in production since 2012, with recording having taken place across various locations in North Korea.
British tour agency Koryo Tours recently provided exclusive photos of the shoot to NK NEWS, showing production taking place near the former mooring point of the USS Pueblo, in downtown Pyongyang.
Pueblo Veterans Association spokesperson Ralph McClintock told NK NEWS that he believed the new production would not be factually correct.
“A ‘new’ film on Pueblo will be nothing more than another North Korean fantasy…Truth has never gotten in the way of a North Korean film production.”
“Over the eleven months of our captivity, everything we saw, everything we were exposed to was a propaganda production,” McClintock added.
Koryo say that the sons of former U.S. nationals who defected to North Korea (Joe Dresnkock and Jerry Wayne Parrish) will be playing the Americans in the new Pueblo movie. It is not yet clear who will be playing Captain Bucher, the American naval officer responsible for the Pueblo on the day of its capture by North Korean naval forces.
Picture copyright Koryo Tours
Koryo report that the “American” actors will be joined by North Korea’s Kim Chol, who is playing the Korean People’s Navy captain that orchestrated the capture of the Pueblo. Kim is a former navy officer and actually helped capture the Pueblo in 1968. He has since worked intermittently as a tourist guide aboard the Pueblo.
With filming having partly taken place on location on the Taedong River, where the Pueblo was towed to in 1995 order to become a tourist destination, North Korean film producers are shown in photos joined by both tourists and locals during scenes Koryo witnessed being shot.
Picture copyright Koryo Tours
The new film is not the first time North Korean propagandists have made a film about the Pueblo incident. A documentary film entitled ‘The Armed Agent Pueblo Last Days” was broadcast on KCTV for the 38th anniversary Pueblo’s capture in 2006. The documentary was 18 minutes long and based on archive footage.
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In the 2006 KCTV documentary viewers are shown the capture of the Pueblo, subsequent U.S. negotiations with North Korea, and present day North Koreans visiting the Pueblo as a tourist attraction.
The documentary producers make a special effort to emphasize that the Pueblo intruded North Korean territorial waters and that the ship carried state-of-the-art intelligence technology to send information about North Korea to the U.S. The U.S. denied that the Pueblo was a spy ship.
The North Korean documentary makers claim that as a result of the Pueblo incident, Pyongyang was able to clearly see America’s agressive intention and will “always remember the incident as an act of awareness.”
The actor-driven feature film has not yet been released, though sources suggest it may be published when renovation works at the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum are completed. The Pueblo was recently moved to the museum as part of renovation works there.
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