Activists to drop ‘Interview’ DVDs into North Korea

Whether or not North Korea is behind the Sony hack, Kim Jong Un better brace himself because “The Interview”, a comedy that has the CIA recruiting a couple of hapless American journalists for a mission to kill Kim Jong Un, is headed to his country. Human rights activists are planning to airlift DVDs into the country via hydrogen balloons.

Fighters for a Free North Korea, run by Park Sang Hak, a former government propagandist who escaped to South Korea, has for years used balloons to get transistor radios, DVDs and other items into North Korea—not to entertain the deprived masses, but to introduce them to the outside world.  Over the past two years, the Human Rights Foundation in New York, created by Thor Halvorssen, has been helping bankroll the balloon drops, with the next one set for January.

The balloons are launched from South Korea and they fly two miles high so that they cannot be shot down. Each is affixed with a small, acid-based timer that breaks open plastic bags and drops packages over the countryside.

Statistics vary, but by some accounts 74 percent of North Koreans have access to a TV and 46 percent to a DVD player, neither of which are illegal assuming only preapproved TV shows and movies are played on them, which increasingly is not the case.

The Kim regime will especially be on the lookout for copies of The Interview, a comedy about a mission to kill Kim Jong Un. “In a totalitarian country the state endeavors to control all citizens, and so every activity that is not government-sponsored is a subversive act,” says Halvorssen. “Watching a film is a crime for which you can be executed. And comedies are hands down the most effective of counterrevolutionary devices.”

[Hollywood Reporter]

This entry was posted in Humanitarian Aid and Relief, Kim Jong Un, North Korean refugee by Grant Montgomery.