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December 16, 2019

Review: Sandra Fahy, “Dying for Rights,” Columbia University Press, 2019

“In a penicillin bottle I wrote her date of birth, the day she died, and her name. I hung the bottle around her neck. I tied her hair. [The other prisoners and I] tied her legs. Her arms. We wrapped her body in a plastic bag. This is what happens in a prison camp in North Korea. That’s how we wrapped the dead bodies. When the warehouse has twenty dead bodies, we take those bodies to a place called the...
Categories Books & Films
September 5, 2017

Kim Jong-Un’s Moonshadow Policy is eclipsing free thought in S. Korea, and beyond

As we begin rehashing the time-worn policy arguments about responding to a nuclear North Korea, it’s useful to inform those arguments with further evidence of just how Pyongyang is leveraging its nuclear hegemony, by escalating its control over speech in South Korea. Last week, a few of us noticed that KCNA published a “death sentence” against four journalists (two reviewers and two newspaper presidents) over a review of “North Korea Confidential” by James Pearson and Daniel Tudor, asserting further that...
Categories Books & Films/Censorship/Korean War II/Media Criticism/Terrorism (NK)
October 27, 2015

Some excerpts from “Dear Leader,” by Jang Jin-Sung

I don’t think Mr. Jang, who presented his book to me with his own hands, would mind me posting a few passages. In this one, Jang relates how, after his unlikely rise from small-town boy to court poet, he went back to his home town of Sariwon in 1994, during the Great Famine, and saw how it had transformed the town and everyone he knew. After a meager meal of rice that his hosts has saved, grain by grain, for weeks,...
Categories Books & Films
October 24, 2015

6 p.m. tonight, Burke, Va.: Korean film “Winter Butterfly” and Q&A with the Director

On this site, I have followed the rise of a dissident culture among North Korean emigres, including poet, author, and public intellectual Jang Jin-Sung; artist Sun Mu; poet Lee Kay-Yeon; and playwright Jung Sung San. If you’re in the Washington, D.C. area, you have a chance to see “Winter Butterfly,” the work of film director Kim Gyu-min, based on his experiences in North Hamgyeong Province, North Korea, tonight. Kim is one of a small number of North Korean emigre film directors active in South Korea....
Categories Books & Films
August 27, 2015

Can Hollywood still make movies about North Korea? We’re about to find out.

Via Deadline Hollywood: Hawaii Five-O star Daniel Dae Kim and his CBS-based production company 3AD are partnering with Sriram Das’ Das Films (November Man) to develop Mike Kim’s Escaping North Korea: Defiance And Hope In The World’s Most Repressive Country, as a feature film. Rosalind Ross (Matador) is attached to pen the adaptation, and the South Korean-born Daniel Dae Kim will star as Mike Kim (no relation). The 2008 memoir chronicles a first-hand account of a high-risk mission to lead...
Categories Books & Films/Censorship
January 12, 2015

The Interview: A Review (Updated)

Does The Interview trivialize the suffering of North Koreans?  I’m not sure what you had a right to expect from the likes of Seth Rogen and James Franco, but I’d say it did so less than I expected. A central theme of the film’s climactic scene — Franco’s interview with Kim Jong Un — was hunger, and the contrast between Kim’s obscene wealth and the squalor of his people. Was The Interview a good parody of North Korea? It was a...
Categories Books & Films
December 18, 2014

If N. Korea hacked Sony and threatened us, here’s how we should respond

The New York Times, quoting “[s]enior administration officials,” is reporting that “American officials have concluded that North Korea ordered the attacks on Sony Pictures’s computers.” Senior administration officials, who would not speak on the record about the intelligence findings, said the White House was debating whether to publicly accuse North Korea of what amounts to a cyberterrorism attack. Sony capitulated after the hackers threatened additional attacks, perhaps on theaters themselves, if the movie, “The Interview,” was released. [N.Y. Times] The...
Categories Books & Films/Censorship/Terrorism (NK)/U.S. Law
December 16, 2014

Suki Kim responds to critics of her decision to go undercover

It’s ironic to read how the people at PUST–who’ve suppressed their religious, political, and moral beliefs to accommodate and assist the world’s most oppressive regime, and also, to suppress the truth about it–have challenged Suki Kim’s ethical decisions. But some of those criticisms might be more valid coming from other sources, so Kim addresses them on her web site. I can’t disagree with Kim’s justification that overt journalism has failed us. There is a long tradition of “undercover” journalism—pretending to be something one is not in...
Categories Books & Films/Foreigners in N. Korea
December 10, 2014

Suki Kim will be on The Daily Show tonight

More on that here. In a separate interview, Ms. Kim says that “North Koreans are so oblivious of the outside world that even some children of elite families believe that Korean is spoken in the rest of the world.” “They, first of all, didn’t know anything about the rest of the world. If any of them did, they were fearful to admit that,” Kim said. “Some of the students really thought people spoke Korean in the rest of the world. So...
Categories Books & Films/Subversion
December 8, 2014

N. Korea: We didn’t hack Sony, but we’re glad someone did

As suspicions grow that North Korea was indeed responsible for the Sony hack, North Korea offers that oddly unconvincing denial. If the North Koreans really did do it, some commenters think the U.S. will have to respond: Aitel says the hacks are potentially “a ‘near red-line moment’” because they represent the kind of incident that would almost require a US policy response assuming a rival state was behind it. As Aitel says, “This is the first demonstration of what the military would call...
Categories Books & Films/Censorship/China & Korea
December 8, 2014

PUST’s un-Christian attacks on Suki Kim

Ms. Kim’s recollections about PUST and North Korea have obvious public interest value for citizens and policymakers, but it’s hard to believe she told us much that an astute observer wouldn’t have guessed anyway. I think the most valuable thing Suki Kim may have taught us is how invested those who “engage” Pyongyang become in imposing a code of omerta to conceal the truth from us, regardless of the ethical cost. But the author, Suki Kim, may have provoked even...
Categories Appeasement/Books & Films
December 2, 2014

Sony Pictures should go after North Korean hackers’ Chinese enablers

Since the weekend, several of you have e-mailed me about “suspicions” – and really, I don’t think they went further than that – that and leaked unreleased movies to file sharers to punish it for “The Interview.” Those rumors were covered by many outlets, but frankly, the open-source evidence for North Korea’s complicity was little more than speculation, at least until I read this today: Hackers who knocked Sony Pictures Entertainment’s computer systems offline last week used tools very similar...
Categories Books & Films/Censorship/China & Korea
October 21, 2014

Sue Terry’s review of Chris Hill’s book was much too kind

Terry’s review isn’t what I’d call favorable, and Terry is a much kinder soul than I am, but it seems too kind to call Hill “one of the most successful diplomats of his generation.” Sure, Hill was one of his generation’s most successful careerists, but as a diplomat, he may have been the greatest human wrecking ball in modern American diplomacy. What I’m really waiting for is a critical appraisal of Hill’s IKEA writing style.
Categories Books & Films
September 23, 2014

4th Annual North Korean Human Rights International Film Festival

NKnet is hosting its 4th annual North Korean Human Rights International Film Festival this coming Friday and Saturday, September 26-27, in Gwanghwamun, Seoul. This year there are 14 films from Korea, the US, and Saudi Arabia, and two of the films received financial support from the festival: November 9th 100 min. – Korea – documentary – no English subtitles Directed by: Kim Gyu-Min (the director of Winter Butterfly, which played at the first NHIFF in 2011) Category: Reunification of the...
Categories Books & Films/Defectors/Human Rights/Refugees
September 17, 2014

Adam Johnson: “Everyone who deals with them eventually gets burned.”

Somewhere, the world’s smallest violin is playing a Samuel Barber adagio for Walter Keats, who whines, not about the North Koreans who shut down his tour business after he spent years coddling and enriching them, but about Adam Johnson for writing a Pulitzer Prize winning novel: Between 2006 and 2012, Walter Keats led dozens of tours as president of Asia Pacific Travel. By 2012, after building trust with North Korean officials, Keats and his wife were permitted to lead groups year-round. Then, without explanation, Keats and his wife...
Categories Books & Films/Foreigners in N. Korea/Useful Idiocy
September 10, 2014

Tonight, on The John Batchelor Show, Bruce Bechtol will discuss North Korea’s …

terrorism, proliferation, and policy responses to both. Bechtol, as you recall, testified as an expert in the Kaplan v. DPRK case that found North Korea liable for sponsoring the Hezbollah rocket attacks that injured the civilian plaintiffs. Judge Lamberth cited both Bechtol’s testimony and his book, The Last Days of Kim Jong Il, in his Memorandum Opinion. The interview will air at 11:15 p.m. Eastern Time in Washington, and at other times in other areas, on this station. You can also...
Categories Books & Films/Terrorism (NK)
August 28, 2014

I love watching North Korean refugees emerging as a cultural force …

to inform the world about life, such as it was, in their homeland. The South China Morning Post covers a North Korean human rights film festival in Hong Kong, and The Washington Post’s new Seoul correspondent, Anna Fifield, covers a young North Korean rapper who doesn’t quite share my taste in music, but does share my outlook about food distribution north of the no-smile line.
Categories Books & Films/Korean Society/Refugees
August 13, 2014

First as tragedy, then as farce

The story I linked Monday about Michael Kirby’s comments spurring the U.N. to action in North Korea eventually grew into two posts, because in the same story, Kirby also warned against trivializing what’s happening in North Korea. The Commission of Inquiry, which reported to the UN in March, detailed horrific abuses of human rights in North Korea, including starving political prisoners reduced to eating grass and rodents in secret gulags, schoolchildren made to watch firing squad executions, and women forced...
Categories "United" Nations/Activism/Books & Films/Censorship