Kimjongilia

George Orwell's novel of a totalitarian future society in which a man whose daily work is rewriting history tries to rebel by falling in love.

At the dawn of WWII, several men escape from a Russian gulag—to take a perilous and uncertain journey to freedom as they cross deserts, mountains and several nations.

In the spring of 1992 documentary filmmaker Dong-won Kim met Cho Chang-son and Kim Seak-hyoung, two North Koreans arrested by South Korean authorities years before. Convicted of spying for the North, they were incarcerated and spent thirty years as political prisoners. These men, and many others like them, underwent conversion schemes in prison that involved torture: those who renounced their communist beliefs were released from prison early. The others, known as "the unconverted," served their full terms. None could return home to the North, however, until the turn of this century, when tensions between North and South eased significantly. Director Dong-won Kim followed these men for ten years, documenting how they survived -both physically and psychologically, the dehumanizing time spent in prison, and their quest, once released, to finally go home.

Shin Dong-Huyk was born on November 19, 1983 as a political prisoner in a North Korean re-education camp. He was a child of two prisoners who had been married by order of the wardens. He spent his entire childhood and youth in Camp 14, in fact a death camp. He was forced to labor since he was six years old and suffered from hunger, beatings and torture, always at the mercy of the wardens. He knew nothing about the world outside the barbed-wire fences. At the age of 23, with the help of an older prisoner, he managed to escape. For months he traveled through North Korea and China and finally to South Korea, where he encountered a world completely strange to him.

In 1966, Dieter Dengler was shot down over Laos, captured, and, down to 85 pounds, escaped. Barefoot, surviving monsoons, leeches, and machete-wielding villagers, he was rescued. Now, near 60, living on Mt. Tamalpais, Dengler tells his story: a German lad surviving Allied bombings in World War II, postwar poverty, apprenticed to a smith, beaten regularly. At 18, he emigrates and peels potatoes in the U.S. Air Force. He leaves for California and college, then enlistment in the Navy to learn to fly. A quiet man of sorrows tells his story: war, capture, harrowing conditions, escape, and miraculous rescue. Where did he find the strength; how does he now live with his memories?

A real-life undercover thriller about two ordinary men who embark on an outrageously dangerous ten-year mission to penetrate the world's most secretive and brutal dictatorship: North Korea.

Hidden camera footage augments this perilous high-stakes journey as we embed with families attempting to escape oppression, ultimately revealing a world most of us have never seen.

A mixed group of prisoners in a concentration camp in North Korea struggle for survival and dignity as best the can, enduring the cruelty of the guards and of their fellow inmates.

Correspondent Lisa Ling manages to penetrate its border by travelling undercover, pretending to work with a Nepalese eye surgeon on a humanitarian mission. Lisa’s time in North Korea offers a rare glimpse of everyday life in the country and some of the issues its people face.

French television documentary film by Mathieu Schwartz, Serge de Sampigny, Yvan Demeulandre and the historic consultant Nicolas Werth about the government of Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union.

Who is Kim Yo-jong? In a context of maximum tensions between North Korea and the United States, Pierre Haski paints an unprecedented portrait of the little sister of Kim Jong-un, whose influence in Pyongyang is growing stronger day by day.

They’ve become the human face of inhuman barbarity. Leaders like Hitler, Idi Amin Dada, Stalin, Kim Jong Il, Saddam Hussein, Nicolae Ceausescu, Bokassa, Muammar Kadhafi, Khomeini, Mussolini and Franco governed their countries completely cut off from reality. These paranoid leaders were driven to abuse their power by the pathology of power itself. Dictators are driven by a relentless, thought-out determination to impose themselves as infallible, all-knowing and all-powerful beings. But they are also men ruled by their caprices, uncontrollable impulses, and reckless fits of frenzy, which paradoxically render them as human as anyone else. The abuses they committed were clearly atrocious, yet some of them were as outlandish as the characters portrayed in the film The Dictator. They sunk to depths worthy of Kafka: so incredibly absurd, they are outrageously funny.

Is it possible to have fun in Pyongyang? Can one be joyful in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea? If so, who can? Everyone? Doing what? Why does Kim Jong-un bet on amusement parks, skis trails, and tourism? This film allows to go beyond mass parades and recurring missile crisis, to meet the people of North Korean “Hermit Kingdom”. The authors have been there dozen times, like amateur anthropologists, filming during eight years parties and harvests, factories and singing contests, Pyongyang and the countryside – and interviewing North Korean people.

In the winter of 2013, Yong-jun and Jae-sung, a member of the Korean People’s Army, are caught having sex by a superior. After that, Yong-jun decides to defect from North Korea to the South leaving Jae-sung behind. Yong-jun risks his life to step on the land of freedom and meets Tae-kyu. Two years after, Jae-sung comes over to the South, and Yong-jun must decide between Jae-sung and Tae-kyu. This causes misunderstandings and puts them in pain.

A North Korean refugee, Jung-Nim, is trying to find a new life in South Korea, with people suspecting that she is a spy.

As a child, Park Hoon and his dad were kidnapped and taken to North Korea. He grew up there, learning to be a doctor just like his father. When Park Hoon escapes back to South Korea and begins work at a prestigious hospital, he makes it his goal to earn enough money to go back to North Korea to rescue his true love. He'll do anything to find her, but then he meets and falls for a mysterious woman who looks exactly like her.

Set in the constitutional monarchy in an imaginary South Korea, South Korea's Crown Prince Lee Jae Ha is forced to join the World Officers Competition, WOC, by his brother. There, he meets North Korea's strongest female devil instructor Kim Hang Ah.

Three shots are fired and the president of South Korea suddenly goes missing from his vacation villa. Three Days is a condensed-time thriller that follows the struggles of elite Blue House bodyguard Han Tae Kyung to find and protect the president. With the aid of local police officer Yoon Bo Won and fellow Blue House guards, will Han Tae Kyung be able to save the president before it’s too late?

The best known and most notorious PoW camp in history is Colditz, an 18th century castle in eastern Germany. With its imposing walls, steep cliffs, and rigorous policing, it was seen as the ultimate prison, home to the worst troublemakers from allied PoW camps all over Europe. Using archive material and dramatic reconstruction, and the personal testimony of Colditz veterans, this series documents the creative and often spectacular attempts to go over, under, around or through the walls. A specially commissioned archaeologist, working with the veterans, also uncovers the secret rooms, hidden tunnels and concealed doors that were so important in securing each precious escape from Colditz. At the start of 1942, British prisoners were lagging behind the French and Dutch in terms of "home runs" but the British success rate was about to improve, as they were getting help from a new source.

The seven episodes explore North America: where civilization collides with untamed wilderness. Just feet beyond our own backyards rages a spectacle we never see. Join us as we step into this hidden world teaming with life - across impossible mountains and endless deserts. Dive into unexplored forests and crash into rugged coasts. This vast continent offers boundless rewards for those brave enough to take on this land - and call her home.

The rise of Stalin, from his early beginning as a bankrobber to the cold-blooded leader of the Soviet Union.

A terrifying, intimate, epic portrait of the biggest movement of people that Europe has seen since World War II.

Set in a dystopian future, a woman is forced to live as a concubine under a fundamentalist theocratic dictatorship. A TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood's novel.

The Kim family's dark and surreal story provides a fresh perspective on North Korea.

A unique look inside the mind of an infamous serial killer with this cinematic self-portrait crafted from statements made by Ted Bundy, including present-day interviews, archival footage and audio recordings from death row.

A paragliding mishap drops a South Korean heiress in North Korea -- and into the life of an army officer, who decides he will help her hide.

A major political, historical, human and economic fact of the 20th century, the Gulag, the extremely punitive Soviet concentration camp system, remains largely unknown.

The documentary series explores different political figures throughout history.

Between 1958 and 1962, China lived through tragedy on an epic scale. The Great Leap Forward conceived by Mao so that China could drive industrial output ahead of Great Britain and achieve autonomy from the might of the neighbouring USSR led to a catastrophic famine resulting in the death of between 36 and 55 million people. But the tragedy was masked by an official lie, because while China was starving to death, the grain stores were full. Based on previously unheard testimony by survivors, rare archive footage, secret documents and interviews with the leading historians on this catastrophe, this film provides, for the first time, an insight into the folly of the Great Leap Forward. It examines the mechanisms and political decisions that led to famine, stripping away the incredible secrecy surrounding the campaign, and exposing the lie which continues even today as to who was responsible, and the true human cost

After the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Mao Tsetung established a system of labor camps for systematic repression, known as Laogai, an abbreviation for "Reform Through Labor". In such camps, forced labor and physical and mental torture were used to bring about a so-called mental reform, re-education in the spirit of the Chinese Communist Party. Millions of Chinese were affected. Many were executed. In hundreds of camps, the Party took advantage of the prisoners' free labor to build the economy. Self-criticism and denunciation were often the only way to escape martyrdom. Successive waves of purges culminated in the Cultural Revolution, which saw massive human rights abuses, political assassinations, massacres, and exiles in remote parts of the country. Using unreleased archive footage, the documentary tells the story of the invention, development and improvement of China's totalitarian system of surveillance and repression up to the present day, never told before.