Kimjongilia

Without a doubt, North Korea is the most isolated country in the world. For sixty years now, the totalitarian regime has been locking its inhabitants up in concentration camps for the slightest transgressions. All it takes is to crumple a newspaper displaying a picture of the country's founding father Kim Il sung or his son, the current ruler Kim Jong il. Thanks to the handful of prisoners who have risked death to escape these camps (some of whom also appear in this documentary), the world has learned of the horrors of life in communist North Korea. Their alarming and powerful accounts of millions of people succumbing to famine in the 1990s, North Korean girls hiding in China, who have been forced into prostitution, and the dependence of the local economy on prison labour are an eloquent contrast to the propagandistic television programmes that reinforce the mass cult of Kim Jong il. By using archive materials and graphically interesting passages in the film, the director N. C. Heikin also lucidly recounts the history of the Korean peninsula.