Saturday, June 23, 2007

National Geographic Documentary

Here is a link to a National Geographic North Korea documentary hosted by Lisa Ling. To watch the whole thing you will have to click on the other four parts of the documentary to the right of the playing video. It is a bit corny and I think some of the facts may not be totally correct, but it still has some interesting interviews and footage.
One thing I didn't know was that the US-South Korea forces sometimes use loudspeakers to send messages across the DMZ. The documentary also shows some fascinating clips of Kim il-sung's funeral. Again, it is definitely not a scholarly documentary or anything, but any sort of footage inside of North Korea is interesting to see.

I have also included a clip of a North Korean cartoon. It shows little kids using pencils as missiles against Americans!

3 comments:

Christina Sin said...

I've seen this documentary two times and I must say that I didn't really like the way they approached the topic. I found myself not really learning anything new, but just feeling weird cause I felt the entire film was very judgmental. I also found the fact that Lisa Ling was constantly narrating the documentary to be a bit annoying cause I would much rather hear from survivors than a woman who probably doesn't know that much about North Korea. I also wasn't sure how accurate the information they were giving out was and found myself being a bit doubtful of the entire documentary.

julienne said...

Though the documentary seemed a bit extreme, for someone who know nothing about North Korea, this would give them a good basis. I though that it was intereting to see this documentary because I have heard a lot about it. I don't think that till I watched to documentary did I fully grasp the extreme reign of the Dear Leader.

Tom Fales said...

Regarding the cartoon, I am not surprised at the militarization of North Korean children after having seen the film in class the other day. Where before I had expected indoctrination to take place, I didn't anticipate the extent to which it actually does.