As Kim Jong-il’s bizarre reign over North Korea comes to a close and an era of uncertainty for the region under his son begins, we started thinking of the great films we have aired which provide glimpses inside the world’s most totalitarian nation in history.
First up, Return to the Border, which aired on our sister series Global Voices, is temporarily FREE to watch in its entirety on PBS Video. Chinese filmmaker Zhao Liang Chinese-born filmmaker reflects on his childhood spent in Dandong, a Chinese town just a stone’s throw from North Korea.
Check out more North Korea films after the jump.
A Dupont winning film set along the same border from our archives is Seoul Train, about the desperate life-and-death risk many North Koreans take in their attempts to cross the Chinese border to escape into South Korea. The film is a powerful look at Asia’s volunteer Underground Railroad to ferry desperate, starving, and tortured North Koreans to freedom. Watch the trailer:
Another great indie doc to pop into our heads (and another Dupont Award-winner) was Academy Award-winner Jane Campion and director Chris Sheridan’s ABDUCTION: The Megumi Yokota Story, the Dupont Award-winning film that exposed a plot in the late 1970s by North Korea to kidnap young Japanese people for their spy agency to study. The hostages were to be used to teach the North Korean spy trainees to speak and act authentically Japanese in order to go undetected and carry out terror attacks. Megumi Yokota was just 13 when she disappeared. Watch the trailer:
Chris Sheridan will be providing an update on the people who appear in Abduction in this space later this week!
the National Endowment for the Arts