Whether or not North Korea is behind the Sony hack, Kim Jong Un better brace himself because The Interview is headed to his country. Human rights activists are planning to airlift DVDs of the Seth Rogen comedy 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.
In 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 Interview likely won't be out on DVD then, but Halvorssen says he'll add copies as soon as possible. Halvorssen, whose group also finances the smuggling of DVD players into North Korea, says that the past dozen or so drops have included copies of movies and TV shows like Braveheart, Battlestar Galactica and Desperate Housewives. Anything with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone is also popular.
"Viewing any one of these is a subversive act that could get you executed, and North Koreans know this, given the public nature of the punishments meted out to those who dare watch entertainment from abroad," Halvorssen says.
"Despite all of that there is a huge thirst for knowledge and information from the outside world," he says. "North Koreans risk their lives to watch Hollywood films ... and The Interview is tremendously threatening to the Kims. They cannot abide by anything that portrays them as anything other than a god. This movie destroys the narrative."
Halvorssen says Hollywood is largely unaware that its product is being used so effectively in this way. At the Oslo Freedom Forum in October, a 21-year-old North Korean escapee named Yeonmi Park, now an intern with Halvorssen's group, described how viewing a black-market copy of James Cameron's Titanic was a life-changing event.
"When I was growing up in North Korea, I never saw anything about love stories between men and women," she said. "Every story was to brainwash about the Kim dictators. A turning point in my life was when I saw the movie Titanic. … I was wondering if the director and the actors would be killed."
She said that as youngsters they are taught that dying for the Kim regime was the most honorable thing one could do, and she and other children were shown propaganda movies to that effect.
"I realized that Titanic showed me a human story about love, beauty, humanity … it gave me a taste of freedom," she said in Oslo. "A man willing to die for a woman — it changed my thinking. It changed the way I saw the regime and the endless propaganda. Titanic made me realize that I was controlled by the regime."
