Documentary: Escape from North Korea

This will be the first of two documentaries from Journeyman Pictures I’ll be featuring this week. “Escape from North Korea” follows an entire North Korean family all the way from their relatively privileged life in Pyongyang to the end of their long journey to escape the North, starting with clandestine camera phone images.

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For both of these documentaries, a big hat tip to commenter and blogger usinkorea.

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7 Responses

  1. I haven’t checked out the videos by that group that deal with Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere, but the North Korea videos are excellent.

    That is the kind of thing I’ve been hoping to see become more and more common on the Internet to get the North Korea Human Rights info out.

    I’m glad to see they gave you the embed code and permission. At least on the You Tube page, it says they blocked embeding without permission. I haven’t tried to embed it on my blog, because I get little traffic.

  2. Wow, a middle-class family from Pyongyang is willing to risk their lives to get out. One more sign the end may not be too far away. Well, one can hope.

    Josh, please check your email, just sent you something you may be interested in.

  3. I actually came across this link :
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JP3UdZRP-Ik&hl=en

    The first bit is – I am sure – familiar to most, though there is also another interrogation on here which I have not seen before. Perhaps of interest.

    I am not a frequent poster on this forum though allow me to use my real name from now on instead of my previous nickname TellTell.

  4. It’s fine to change your handle openly; I just ask that you stick with that. As for that video, I have serious concerns that it could be fake (this is the one where the armband changes arms, right?).

    The difficult balance you’ve got to strike here is knowing what to believe and disbelieve when independent confirmation is generally impossible. Here’s the framework on which I operate:

    1. Is the allegation generally credible and consistent with other known facts?

    2. Do the circumstances of the evidence for the allegation lend themselves to easy fabrication?

    3. Is there a personal or financial motive for the witness to fabricate the evidence?

    If the evidence has a net positive balance after I apply all of those tests and the proof is still imperfect — it usually is — I will draw an adverse inference against the party that has and refuses to disclose information that could confirm or rebut the allegation. More often than not, that party is the North Korean regime, which incredibly denies that torture and concentration camps even exist in the Workers’ Paradise.

    Unfortunately, it’s often just as impossible to say that something is fake as it is to say it’s genuine.

  5. Fair enough, no one can ultimately say whether these are genuine. All I can add is that I didn’t notice an armband-change unless we’re talking about something like a black miniband at the lower arms – although both torture clips seem armband-less to me. If these clips are indeed fakes, then the producers have certainly done a good job fooling me.

    Anyway, thanks for the relay of some ‘vetting criteria’, and yes, will also use only my ‘new’ name when posting here.