North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il was trying to show his starving, imprisoned nation how badly South Korea had treated a North Korean national hero.
He released a propaganda film about North Korean spy Lee In-Mo, who had been held 42 years in a South Korean prisons. The trouble is, when North Korean audiences saw the film, they noticed how well their comrade had been fed in South Korea.
Lee eventually staged a hunger strike to protest his imprisonment, the film reports. North Korean movie audiences were shocked. A hunger strike? Who would do that?
“What we could not believe in the movie was that Lee and others were conducting hunger strikes in the prison,” a North Korean defector told South Koreans about the movie.
“Refusing to eat was a form of resistance in the South? Boy, South Korea must be a paradise. That’s what we said among ourselves.”
Short run. The Lee In-Mo documentary isn’t expected to be shown too many more times. The North Koreans were heartened to see Lee return home in 1993, but now they know too well he was transferred from prisons where he had the choice to go without food to another where there is no choice.
Frank Warner
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