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A pencil line drawn in Washington at the end of a distant war.
A strip of land mined and fenced, where the fighting stopped but never really ended. (The Guardian)
From that line, two different futures were built on the same ruins.
In The Polarization of Koreas, a new long-form documentary, we follow how one small peninsula was turned into the most extreme experiment in modern history. On one side, a hereditary political religion that promised equality and produced darkness – a state that sealed its people off from the world and told them that everything they needed to know was already inside. On the other, a hyper-capitalist miracle that flooded the night with light and data – an economy that lifted millions out of poverty, but quietly filled their lives with stress, debt and invisible despair. (Earth Observatory)
The film moves from the firestorms of the Korean War to the ecological silence of the DMZ, where landmines and watchtowers now protect cranes and deer better than any conservation law. (The Guardian) It travels through Pyongyang’s choreographed mass games and Seoul’s K-pop stadiums, through underground churches in the North and neon megachurches in the South, through famine markets and convenience stores that never close. Archive newsreels, state television, propaganda songs, smartphone footage and satellite images are cut together into a single, unsettling story of how two systems tried to escape the same trauma – and ended up as mirror images of each other. (U.S. Department of War)
Politicians, generals and technocrats once claimed they were creating rational, modern societies in Korea. Instead, they produced two science-fictions that now exist side by side – one frozen in the twentieth century, the other racing ahead into the twenty-first. The border between them glows in the dark like a scar visible from space, but the forces that created that scar are not confined to Korea. They are spreading through the rest of the world. (Earth Observatory)
This is not just a film about a strange, divided country far away. It is a film about us – and about what happens when stories of progress break down, leaving millions of people trapped between fear and freedom, in two different Koreas that were never meant to exist.
Chapter 1 – Drawing The Line
(Article-style write-up of the full first chapter – with narration lines, screen directions, and suggested footage.)
Opening: The Line In The Mist
On screen:
Slow aerial shot of the Demilitarized Zone at dawn. The camera moves along a strip of fog, low over quiet fields and coils of barbed wire. No people. Just towers, fences and thin white posts disappearing into the distance.
A soft orchestral track from the 1970s (something mournful, slightly kitsch) fades in underneath.
Voice-over:
This is one of the most dangerous places on earth.
But it did not begin as a clash of civilizations.
It began as a line.
Drawn in a hurry…
On somebody else’s map.
Cut to black.
Title card: Polarization of Koreas
Sequence 1 – A Country That Expected To Be Whole
On screen:
Black-and-white newsreel from August 1945: Korean crowds in Seoul ripping down Japanese flags, waving the Taegukgi, children climbing onto lampposts, people crying and laughing at the same time. Japanese signs over shopfronts.
Lower-third caption: ‘Seoul, August 1945 – Japanese surrender’
Voice-over:
For thirty-five years, Korea had been a colony of the Japanese empire.
Japanese police ran the streets.
Japanese companies owned the mines and the factories.
Korean students were forced to speak Japanese in school and bow to the Emperor. (Wikipedia)
On screen:
Quick montage of Japanese colonial images – a Japanese-run classroom; conscripted Korean labourers in mines and factories; propaganda posters in Japanese; military parades in colonial Seoul. (Wikipedia)
Voice-over:
The Japanese took land, labour and language.
But they also did something else.
They taught Koreans that modern power came from empires and machines.
And in the end, their own empire collapsed first.
On screen:
The mushroom cloud over Nagasaki, then a map of East Asia with arrows showing Soviet forces pouring into northern Korea from Manchuria and US forces approaching from the south.
Voice-over:
In August 1945, Japan surrendered.
The Koreans assumed this meant their country would be reborn – as a single, independent nation.
Instead, what they got…
Was a problem in someone else’s office.
The music dips.
Sequence 2 – The Map Room
On screen:
Reconstruction shot: a dim office in Washington, late at night, August 1945. Two tired American officers in rolled-up shirtsleeves – Charles Bonesteel and Dean Rusk – lean over a National Geographic map of Korea. Cigarettes burning in ashtrays. A desk fan turns slowly. (NK News – North Korea News)
We never see their faces clearly – just their hands and the pencil.
Voice-over (matter-of-fact):
The Americans had a problem.
Stalin’s army was racing down the Korean peninsula from the north.
They needed a line – fast – to tell the Soviets where to stop.
Close-up on the map. The camera glides past the printed label ‘National Geographic’.
Voice-over:
Two mid-level officers were told to find one.
They were not experts on Korea.
They had never been there.
They did not speak Korean. (NK News – North Korea News)
One of the officers’ hands traces the coastline north of Seoul, hesitates.
Voice-over:
On the map there were mountains, rivers, railways.
But the officers were in a hurry.
Then they noticed a thin black line already printed across the paper.
The 38th parallel.
The pencil strokes firmly along the 38th parallel.
Voice-over:
They decided that would do.
On screen:
The pencil mark glows red, then thickens and becomes an animated border slicing the peninsula in half.
Voice-over:
To them, it was a convenient line.
To millions of Koreans, it would become something else.
A line that split villages in two.
That trapped families on opposite sides of history.
And eventually…
A line between the brightest cities in Asia, and one of the darkest places on earth. (Wikipedia)
Cut back briefly to the DMZ at dawn – now with soldiers barely visible through the mist.
Sequence 3 – Two Occupations
On screen:
Newsreel of Soviet troops entering Pyongyang: T-34 tanks, Red Army soldiers handing out leaflets; a brass band. Then US troops landing at Incheon and Jinsen, walking past lines of surrendering Japanese soldiers. (Wikipedia)
Voice-over:
The line on the map became two occupation zones.
Soviet troops in the north.
American troops in the south.
Cut to:
A US officer reading out a proclamation through a loudhailer to a confused crowd in Seoul.
Voice-over:
In the south, the United States Army Military Government took control.
They kept much of the Japanese colonial bureaucracy in place.
They outlawed Korean committees that had sprung up to run local life. (Wikipedia)
On screen:
US Military Government paperwork, rubber stamps, memos about ‘public order’. We see an English-language noticeboard: ‘United States Army Military Government in Korea’.
Cut to:
A Soviet general addressing Korean officials in Pyongyang, with a portrait of Stalin on the wall.
Voice-over:
In the north, the Soviet Civil Administration set about building a different system.
They needed a Korean leader.
Someone loyal.
And useful.
On screen:
Early photograph of a young Kim Il Sung in a Soviet uniform, then footage of his first public appearance in Pyongyang in October 1945 – applauding crowds, banners, Red Army officers sitting on the stage behind him. (Wikipedia)
Voice-over:
They chose a thirty-something guerrilla fighter who had spent the war with the Red Army.
His name was Kim Il Sung.
The Soviet general in charge later admitted they helped build his image from scratch.
On screen:
In parallel, footage of Syngman Rhee, older, in a Western suit and thick spectacles, stepping off a US military aircraft in Seoul in October 1945, surrounded by American officers. (Encyclopedia Britannica)
Voice-over:
In the south, the Americans flew in their own Korean leader.
Syngman Rhee.
He had spent much of his life in exile in the United States.
He was almost unknown inside Korea…
But he spoke English.
He was fiercely anti-communist.
And he promised to keep Korea on America’s side. (Encyclopedia Britannica)
On screen:
Split-screen montage.
Left: Kim Il Sung smiling stiffly on a Moscow-style podium.
Right: Syngman Rhee giving a speech in Seoul, flanked by US officers and Korean police.
Voice-over:
Two leaders.
One chosen by Moscow.
One lifted up by Washington.
Both telling their people that they were Korea.
And the other side was a fake. (libertyinnorthkorea.org)
Sequence 4 – Ordinary People, New Flags
On screen:
Late-1940s street scenes. In the south: crowded markets in Seoul, American jeeps pushing through rickshaws, Japanese shop signs hastily replaced by Korean ones. In the north: workers marching with red flags through Pyongyang, banners with hammers and sickles.
From a 1980s South Korean TV documentary:
Interview with an elderly woman in hanbok, sitting in a modest living room. Subtitles:
‘We thought the liberation would mean one Korea again. Nobody told us that the Russians and the Americans had already cut us in two.’
From a North Korean war-anniversary programme:
Old veterans sit in medals, recalling how the Soviets brought Kim to Pyongyang. Subtitles:
‘They said: Comrade Kim Il Sung is the sun of our nation. We believed them. We were tired, but we were proud.’
Voice-over:
On both sides of the line, people tried to rebuild their lives.
But the two occupying powers had different ideas about what those lives should look like.
On screen:
In the south, US Military Government orders posted on walls; Koreans queuing for rice; striking workers being pushed back by police. (Wikipedia)
In the north, land reform rallies: peasants cheering as landlords’ registers are burned; Soviet officers watching from the sidelines. (Wikipedia)
Voice-over:
In the south, the Americans kept many colonial officials and police.
They cracked down on left-wing organisations and peasant unions.
Protests were suppressed.
In the north, the Soviets staged land reform and purges of collaborators.
Korean communists were promoted.
A new elite took shape around Kim Il Sung.
Sequence 5 – Two Republics, One Country
On screen:
Newsreel captions: ‘Seoul, August 15, 1948’ – crowds gathered, Rhee taking the oath as President of the Republic of Korea. Then: ‘Pyongyang, September 9, 1948’ – Kim Il Sung declares the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. (libertyinnorthkorea.org)
Voice-over:
In 1948, the division became official.
In the south, elections supervised by the United Nations produced the Republic of Korea – with Syngman Rhee as president.
In the north, a few weeks later, Kim Il Sung proclaimed the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
Each government claimed to rule all Koreans, on both sides of the line. (libertyinnorthkorea.org)
On screen:
Cut between the two capital cities that year.
Seoul: shabby wooden buildings, carts, a few cars and trams.
Pyongyang: Soviet-style rallies, big banners of Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Kim.
Voice-over:
At this point, the split was still mostly on paper.
Families could still cross the 38th parallel.
Traders could still move rice and fuel up and down the country.
Many Koreans thought the division was temporary.
That somehow, one side would win the argument.
And that this would reunite the peninsula.
On screen:
A 1980s South Korean family drama scene set in the late 1940s: two brothers argue in a courtyard – one with a left-leaning student look, the other in police uniform. The father sits in silence. Subtitles hint at the tension: ‘If you go north, you are no longer my son.’
Then cut to a North Korean TV drama from the 1970s, showing a noble partisan family denouncing a ‘traitor’ who collaborates with the US Military Government.
Voice-over:
The television dramas made decades later would change the details.
But the basic story was the same on both sides.
A family breaks in two.
One side becomes heroes.
The other becomes villains.
Sequence 6 – From Cold Peace To Hot War
On screen:
Archival map: the 38th parallel, dotted with small icons showing border skirmishes from 1949 to mid-1950.
Voice-over:
Beneath the surface, the line was already cracking.
There were raids, ambushes, assassinations.
Armed clashes that killed thousands before the war even officially began. (Wikipedia)
On screen:
US newsreel of 1950: headlines about ‘Tension in Korea’, US generals warning of communist expansion. Then, black-and-white footage of Kim Il Sung giving a speech about ‘liberating the south’.
Voice-over:
Both leaders promised to reunify the country by force if necessary.
Kim Il Sung lobbied Stalin and Mao for support in a northern offensive.
Syngman Rhee spoke openly about marching his army north. (Encyclopedia Britannica)
On screen:
June 25, 1950. North Korean T-34 tanks rumbling south across a bridge. South Korean soldiers abandoning positions. Civilians fleeing with bundles on their backs. (Wikipedia)
Voice-over:
In June 1950, the North moved first.
Its tanks smashed through thin southern defences.
Within three days, Seoul fell.
The line on the map dissolved… into a war that would kill around three million people, most of them civilians. (Wikipedia)
Sequence 7 – Total War On A Small Peninsula
On screen:
Montage of the early phase of the Korean War.
US and South Korean troops retreating to the south-east ‘Pusan Perimeter’; refugees on roads; planes taking off from carriers; MacArthur smoking a pipe.
Voice-over:
The United States and its allies pushed back under a United Nations flag.
They landed at Incheon.
They drove the North Korean army back past the 38th parallel and all the way to the Chinese border. (Wikipedia)
On screen:
Chinese People’s Volunteer Army marching through snow-covered mountains, bugles sounding.
Voice-over:
Then hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops poured into the war.
American soldiers described it as a human wave – an endless line of men emerging from the freezing hills.
The front lurches back and forth on an animated map, like a ricocheting line of fire.
Voice-over:
Over three years, almost every city in Korea was destroyed.
Historians estimate that about twelve to fifteen percent of the North’s entire population died – a proportion comparable to, or worse than, the Soviet Union in the Second World War. (Wikipedia)
On screen:
US Air Force camera footage: bombs dropping on anonymous towns; napalm canisters blossoming into sheets of fire; whole districts burning. Then still photographs of flattened North Korean cities – only chimneys left standing. (Wikipedia)
Voice-over (flat):
American bombers dropped 635,000 tons of bombs on Korea.
And thirty-two thousand tons of napalm.
More than in the entire Pacific theatre in the Second World War.
By the end, at least eighteen of North Korea’s twenty-two major cities were more than half destroyed. (Wikipedia)
On screen:
Close-ups of charred bodies, children with bandaged faces, women staring at the camera with expressionless shock. Documentaries, not re-enactments.
From a later North Korean TV documentary:
A narrator’s voice over black-and-white ruins, accusing America of genocide. Subtitles:
‘They bombed every city, every village. They wanted to erase our people from the earth.’ (Wikipedia)
From a South Korean broadcaster’s 50th-anniversary special:
Interview with an old man who was a child during the war:
‘We walked for days. The sky was always full of planes. My mother told me: If we survive this, maybe we will see our cousins in the North again. We never did.’ (Wikipedia)
Voice-over:
For ordinary Koreans, the war was not about ideologies.
It was about staying ahead of the bombs.
And never knowing which army would arrive next.
Sequence 8 – The Armistice And The Frozen Line
On screen:
A rainy day at Panmunjom, July 27, 1953. Inside a drab hut, military officers from the UN Command, North Korea and China sit at a long table. Papers are signed. Cameras flash weakly. (National Archives)
Voice-over:
In 1953, the war ended the way it had begun.
With a line.
On screen:
A hand draws a new line on a map – the Military Demarcation Line – snaking roughly along the old 38th parallel. Then the DMZ appears around it: a four-kilometre-wide buffer zone, shaded grey. (Wikipedia)
Voice-over:
The armistice created the Demilitarized Zone – four kilometres of no-man’s land, stretching two hundred and fifty kilometres across the peninsula.
It was not a peace treaty.
North and South Korea were still technically at war.
They still are. (National Archives)
On screen:
Colour footage from the 1960s: barbed wire being laid; minefields; guard posts being built. The first tour groups visiting an observation platform on the southern side, staring at a distant village through binoculars.
Voice-over:
The line that had begun as a quick fix in Washington…
Became one of the most heavily fortified borders on earth.
A place where armies stare at each other across rice fields and minefields.
And where, by accident, even the wildlife is trapped between two systems that hate each other. (The Guardian)
Cut back to the very first shot in the film – the DMZ at dawn. But now the mist is thinner. We can see South Korean and US watchtowers on one side, North Korean posts on the other, and a white concrete slab marking the line.
Voice-over:
This is where our story really begins.
Because on either side of this line…
Two very different experiments in modern life are about to unfold.
One will become a hereditary, nuclear-armed cult state.
The other will become a hyper-capitalist, hyper-connected democracy.
And together, they will turn this accidental border into something else.
Not just a line on a map…
But the edge between two different kinds of reality.
Music swells and then cuts off abruptly.
Fade to black.
Title card: Chapter 2 – Two Dictatorships, Two Dreams (to come next in the larger article)
Chapter 2 – Two Dictatorships, Two Dreams
(Full chapter as if for the documentary script / article – with Curtis-style narration, screen directions, and contextual explanations.)
Opening: Two Fathers
On screen:
Grainy black-and-white close-up of Kim Il Sung in the mid-1950s, smiling broadly on a reviewing stand. His hair is thick, his cheeks round; behind him, Soviet officers clap politely.
Hard cut to:
Syngman Rhee in a dark suit and thick glasses, sitting stiffly at a desk in Seoul, speaking into a microphone in English-accented Korean.
A slow, melancholy piece of 1960s orchestral music begins – strings and military snare, slightly distorted.
Voice-over:
Out of the ruins of the war, the two Koreas chose two fathers.
One was a young guerrilla who had marched with the Red Army.
The other was an old exile who had spent decades in America, dreaming of coming home.
Both promised to protect the nation.
Both said they would rebuild the country from the ashes.
And both believed that to do that, they had to control not just politics…
But the inside of people’s heads.
Sequence – The Revolutionary Father
On screen:
1950s Pyongyang in black and white. Wide avenues, bare trees, bomb damage still visible. Streetcars rattle past crowds in padded jackets.
The camera tilts up to a banner with Kim Il Sung’s face printed above a slogan in Korean.
Voice-over:
In the north, Kim Il Sung was turning his half of Korea into a laboratory.
The Soviet Union had installed him as the leader of a new communist state.
After the war, he began to remove anyone who might challenge him.
On screen:
Archive photos of early Workers’ Party meetings. Faction labels typed on screen: Soviet-Korean faction, Yan’an faction, Domestic communists.
Quick cuts to headlines from internal Soviet reports and diplomatic cables summarised on screen:
‘Factional struggle in DPRK’, ‘Purges of pro-Soviet cadres’. (kinu.or.kr)
Voice-over:
In the late nineteen-fifties, Kim carried out a series of purges.
Communists who had fought with the Chinese revolutionaries.
Others who had grown up in the Soviet Union.
Old underground organisers from Seoul.
One by one, they were accused of being spies, traitors, dogmatists.
Some were executed.
Others simply disappeared from the record.
On screen:
A party photograph. As the narrator speaks, faces literally fade out of the frame, leaving only Kim in the centre.
Voice-over:
By nineteen sixty, there was almost no one left around Kim who could remember a time before he was the leader.
Cut to:
Animated pages of a North Korean schoolbook from the early 1960s. Children draw Kim’s portrait; captions call him the Great Leader, the sun of the nation. (Wikipedia)
Voice-over:
A new story was written.
In it, Kim was no longer just a politician.
He was the Great Leader – the man who had personally liberated Korea from the Japanese, defeated the Americans and re-built the country.
His real past – complicated, full of compromises – was replaced by a simple myth.
On screen:
North Korean 1970s documentary footage: long sequences of Kim walking through factories, dams, and rice fields, workers clapping in slow motion.
Voice-over:
The myth said: he had always been there.
He had always known what to do.
And if you followed him, the revolution would never fail.
Sequence – Marked For Life
On screen:
A colour graphic appears – a stylised pyramid labelled ‘Songbun’. Three big bands: Core; Wavering; Hostile. Smaller lines etched within. (Wikipedia)
Voice-over:
But Kim Il Sung did something else.
He divided the entire population into categories of loyalty.
A secret social classification, called songbun.
The camera zooms into the pyramid.
Voice-over (steady, almost clinical):
It was created between nineteen fifty-seven and nineteen sixty, just as he was purging his rivals. (Human Rights Watch)
Every citizen was investigated.
Officials looked at their parents.
Their grandparents.
Whether they had owned land under the Japanese.
Whether anyone in their family had ever collaborated, or simply said the wrong thing.
On screen:
Re-enacted close-ups of files being stamped. A clerk types names into a typewriter. Words appear over the image: Core, Wavering, Hostile. (HRNK)
Voice-over:
The results were written into secret files.
If you were from a guerrilla family, or a worker who had fought the Japanese, you were core class.
If your relatives had been landlords, or Christians, or had fled south…
You were hostile.
Cut to:
Later defector interview from a Human Rights Watch report. A North Korean man in his fifties, face in shadow, voice altered. Subtitles on screen: (Human Rights Watch)
‘They did not tell you directly.
But you would find out.
You could not enter the army.
You could not go to university.
You were never chosen for good jobs.
You understood: you were being punished for what your grandfather had done.’
Voice-over:
Songbun turned the whole country into a quiet caste system.
It decided where you could live.
How much food you got in a famine.
Whether the police believed you.
Even whether you had any chance of becoming one of the small elite in Pyongyang. (Wikipedia)
On screen:
North Korean TV drama from the 1980s. A virtuous worker family – father in overalls, mother in a neat jacket – receives housing in a new Pyongyang apartment block. The father bows repeatedly to a party official.
Then cut to another scene: a shabby family in the countryside is given a curt rejection for the same opportunity – the official citing their ‘bad background’ in veiled language.
Voice-over:
On North Korean television, this system was never shown as a system.
It appeared as morality tales.
Good families who had always been loyal would be rewarded.
Bad families were punished by fate.
Ordinary people learned to read the hints.
They knew that their own fate had already been decided by something they could never change.
Soft, eerie synths come in under the orchestral music.
Sequence – The Old Man President
On screen:
Back to the south. Early 1950s footage: Syngman Rhee in military uniform at a rally, speaking into several microphones; Korean and American flags behind him.
Voice-over:
In the south, the father of the nation was Syngman Rhee.
He had spent decades in the United States, lobbying for Korean independence.
Now he was president of the new Republic of Korea.
Like Kim, he believed the country could only survive if he remained in charge. (Wikipedia)
On screen:
Newsreel of anti-communist police raids in the late 1940s; men with armbands dragging suspects away; banners condemning ‘reds’.
Voice-over:
Rhee’s government crushed left-wing movements and peasant uprisings.
In 1948 he declared martial law to suppress a rebellion on Jeju island.
Thousands of civilians were killed by security forces. (AP News)
We see blurred stills from the Jeju uprising: bodies in fields, armed constables.
Voice-over:
The war gave him an excuse to tighten his control.
His police tortured opponents.
Elections were rigged.
Opposition newspapers were shut down. (Wikipedia)
On screen:
A 1950s South Korean newsreel announcing an election victory. Rhee smiles, waving stiffly from a balcony.
Then – jump forward – 1980s South Korean TV documentary. Interview with a former student activist, now a middle-aged lawyer. Subtitles:
‘We called him the Old Man President.
Everyone knew the elections were fake.
But there was no alternative.
If you protested, you could disappear.’ (Wikipedia)
Voice-over:
By nineteen sixty, Rhee was eighty-five.
The country was still poor.
Inflation was high.
Unemployment was rising.
Yet he insisted that only he could defend South Korea from communism. (Wikipedia)
On screen:
Close-up of ballot boxes in March 1960. Observers look nervous. A student holds up a ballot paper stained with blood – re-used in later documentaries as the symbol of a murdered voter. (Wikipedia)
Voice-over:
When his party blatantly rigged the presidential election that spring, something snapped.
Sequence – Students Versus The State
On screen:
Colour-graded black-and-white footage of crowds in Masan in April 1960. Students in uniforms, workers, housewives. Police lines. Tear gas. Stones thrown. (Wikipedia)
Voice-over:
Students in the port city of Masan began to protest.
Police shot at them.
A high-school boy disappeared.
On screen:
A still photograph of the dead student, Kim Ju-yul, his body recovered from the harbour with a tear-gas grenade embedded in his eye – an image that circulated widely. (Wikipedia)
Voice-over (quiet):
When fishermen found his body in the harbour, with a tear-gas shell lodged in his skull, photographs of him spread across the country.
The state said it was all communist agitation.
Very few believed them.
On screen:
Seoul, April 19. Tens of thousands of students marching, filling Sejong-ro. Some carry banners denouncing electoral fraud; others wave the national flag. Police firing; bodies on stretchers. (Wikipedia)
Voice-over:
Within days, students were on the streets of the capital.
They marched on the presidential Blue House.
Police fired live ammunition.
More than a hundred people were killed. (Wikipedia)
Cut to:
American news anchor voice from 1960:
‘In Seoul today, South Korean students defied a government ban and demonstrated against President Rhee, accusing him of corruption and electoral fraud…’
On screen:
US embassy cables (recreated): lines highlighted – ‘public anger’, ‘fraudulent election’, ‘situation untenable’. (Diplomatic Studies & Training)
Voice-over:
The Americans realised that their ally had become a liability.
Rhee resigned and was flown into exile in Hawaii – by the CIA. (Diplomatic Studies & Training)
On screen:
Photograph of Rhee stepping into an aircraft, escorted by US officials. Then a quiet shot of him in a small house in Honolulu years later, reading a newspaper in an armchair.
Voice-over:
South Korea’s first dictatorship collapsed in shame.
Students had forced the old man out.
For a moment, it looked as if a real democracy might emerge. (Research Guides)
The music briefly lifts, hopeful.
Sequence – The Young Colonel
On screen:
Colour footage of chaotic Seoul streets in 1960–61. Demonstrations, strikes, arguments in parliament broadcast on early South Korean TV. Cabinet reshuffles reported in rapid news clips.
Voice-over:
But the new government was weak.
Ministers fell out with each other.
The economy was in trouble.
Strikes and protests continued.
The police were distrusted. (Wikipedia)
On screen:
Barracks. A young officer in uniform – Park Chung-hee – studies documents at a simple desk. The camera circles him slowly.
Voice-over:
Watching all this from the army was a little-known officer.
Colonel Park Chung-hee.
Park believed that Korea needed discipline, not democracy.
He and his allies decided that if the politicians could not control the country, the army would. (Wikipedia)
On screen:
Early morning, 16 May 1961. Tanks and armoured cars roll into Seoul. Soldiers march over bridges. Radio stations are seized. (Wikipedia)
We hear the crackly sound of the coup announcement – Park’s Military Revolutionary Committee reading a manifesto over the radio.
Voice-over:
In May nineteen sixty-one, Park and his fellow officers staged a coup.
They called it a revolution.
They promised to restore order, crush corruption and rebuild the economy.
The United States was uneasy at first.
But quickly decided it was better than chaos – or communism. (Wikipedia)
On screen:
Kennedy administration footage: American officials meeting Park, shaking hands.
Voice-over:
Within two years, Park was no longer simply a general.
He had become president – in his own right.
A new type of dictatorship was taking shape in the south.
Cut to:
70s-era South Korean news show: Park in sunglasses inspecting a steel plant, then addressing a stadium packed with young people in identical tracksuits.
Sequence – The Developmental Barracks
On screen:
Montage of 1960s South Korea: construction sites, bridges being built, power lines going up, ships being assembled in shipyards.
Voice-over:
Park turned the entire country into a kind of barracks.
But it was a barracks with an economic plan.
On screen:
A government planning office. Charts on walls showing export targets. Young bureaucrats with thick glasses and crewcuts in white shirts, working late into the night.
Voice-over:
Economists later called this a developmental state.
A small group of officials, insulated from politics, would decide which industries to build.
Steel.
Shipbuilding.
Electronics.
They offered cheap loans and tax breaks to a few chosen business groups – the chaebol – as long as they exported. (PIIE)
On screen:
1960s advertisement from Samsung for black-and-white televisions; early Hyundai shipyard launching a tanker; LG factory floor.
Voice-over:
In return, business accepted tight control.
Unions were kept weak.
Strikes were crushed.
The intelligence agency that Park created – the KCIA – monitored politicians, journalists and students. (Wikipedia)
On screen:
Archival video of KCIA headquarters; blurred surveillance images from the 1970s; interrogations hinted at in later truth-commission documentaries.
Voice-over:
It was a trade.
Freedom for growth.
And for a while, many South Koreans accepted it.
On screen:
A 1970s South Korean promo film: happy families moving into new apartment blocks; young women in miniskirts walking through bustling Seoul streets; overlaid export numbers ticking upwards.
Voice-over:
Under Park, the economy grew at some of the fastest rates ever recorded in the world.
Western journalists began to talk about the Miracle on the Han River. (PIIE)
Cut back to:
Behind the promotional footage, we briefly see the other side – 1970s black-and-white images of student protests against Park’s rule; riot police beating demonstrators; workers striking at a textile factory.
Voice-over:
But it came with a price.
Political opponents were jailed or killed.
Journalists were censored.
When protests grew in the early nineteen-seventies, Park simply changed the constitution. (Wikipedia)
On screen:
The word ‘Yushin’ appears on screen in big Korean characters.
Voice-over:
In nineteen seventy-two, he imposed the Yushin constitution – the ‘revitalising’ reforms.
In reality, it turned the presidency into a legal dictatorship. (Wikipedia)
On screen:
Park announcing Yushin on national TV. Parliament clapping nervously.
Animated text lists appear briefly:
– President elected indirectly by a loyal electoral college.
– Unlimited re-election.
– Power to rule by decree.
– Right to suspend the constitution in an ‘emergency’. (Wikipedia)
Voice-over:
Park could now be re-elected forever.
He could rule by decree.
He could declare emergencies whenever he liked.
South Korea was still officially a democracy.
But in practice it was something else: a military-industrial project wrapped in the language of elections.
Sequence – Two Systems, Same Method
On screen:
Intercut images.
North: Kim Il Sung on a podium in Pyongyang in the 1970s, entire square filled with synchronised dancers and soldiers.
South: Park Chung-hee at a mass rally of factory youth, everybody in identical uniforms, chanting slogans about productivity.
Voice-over:
By the mid-seventies, both Koreas were run by strongmen who had no serious rivals.
In the north, Kim Il Sung ruled through a party that claimed to be the mother and father of the people.
In the south, Park ruled through a state that called itself democratic, but behaved like a barracks. (Wikipedia)
On screen:
Split screen.
Left: animated songbun pyramid over footage of North Korean countryside.
Right: a South Korean classroom where children recite times tables and national slogans, teachers wielding sticks.
Voice-over:
Both systems demanded sacrifice.
Both said: we are still at war.
Kim used blood and ancestry to sort his people – a hereditary loyalty test you could never escape. (Wikipedia)
Park used grades and performance – your place in the new society would be decided by your marks, your obedience and how hard you worked. (PIIE)
On screen:
North Korean TV propaganda: schoolchildren singing hymns to Kim, wearing red scarves; the teacher corrects a child’s posture in front of his portrait.
South Korean 1970s educational TV: animated cartoons telling kids to study hard to help the nation grow; a stern teacher pointing at a blackboard that says ‘EXAM’.
Voice-over:
In Pyongyang, children learned that their leader was a genius who had always known the correct line.
In Seoul, children were told they could become anything – if they studied hard enough.
One side promised purity.
The other promised prosperity.
Sequence – Cracks In The Dreams
On screen:
Late-1970s footage from both sides.
North: Kim Il Sung standing beside his son Kim Jong Il, at a rally. A slogan on a wall: ‘Long live the great leader Comrade Kim Il Sung and the brilliant commander Comrade Kim Jong Il.’
South: Park at a banquet, slightly drunk, laughing; KCIA director Kim Jae-gyu at his side.
Voice-over:
Underneath, both dreams were starting to crack.
Voice-over (over North images):
In the north, the planned economy was losing momentum.
The state could not provide the prosperity it had promised.
But Kim’s personality cult was now so absolute that no one could admit this. (Wilson Center)
Voice-over (over South images):
In the south, workers and students were no longer willing to accept the bargain.
They began to demand real democracy – not just growth.
Park responded with more repression, more censorship, more martial law. (Wikipedia)
On screen:
Night-time protests in Busan and Masan in 1979; burning police stations; banners opposing the Yushin regime.
Cut back to:
The small dining room of the KCIA headquarters in October 1979. We re-enact, from a respectful distance, the dinner where Park is about to be assassinated by his own intelligence chief.
We don’t show the shooting – just the table, the plates, the stunned faces as the sound of a gunshot echoes.
Voice-over:
That autumn, Park was shot dead by the head of his own secret police.
The developmental dictator was gone. (Wikipedia)
On screen:
Funeral crowds; then student protests that follow; then soldiers storming Seoul in 1980 under General Chun Doo-hwan – showing that one dictatorship is simply replaced by another. (AP News)
Voice-over:
In the south, the system he had built – the alliance of generals, bureaucrats and businessmen – survived without him.
Cut back to:
Kim Il Sung on a huge mural, still smiling, still alive in the north.
Voice-over:
In the north, Kim Il Sung would live on for another decade and a half.
Long enough to pass power to his son.
And to lock in a system where all roads led back to the family. (Wikipedia)
Closing Beat For The Chapter
On screen:
A long, slow, silent split-screen.
Left: an early-1960s North Korean May Day parade, red flags, Kim Il Sung waving from a balcony as tanks roll past.
Right: a late-1960s South Korean industrial parade – Park in sunglasses waving as factory workers in uniforms march behind banners for Samsung, Hyundai, Daewoo.
The music fades to a single sustained note.
Voice-over:
By the end of the nineteen-seventies, the peninsula had become a kind of mirror.
On one side, a revolutionary monarchy where your fate was fixed by your grandfather’s loyalty.
On the other, a developmental barracks where your worth would be measured in grades, obedience and export statistics.
Both were still authoritarian.
Both still claimed to defend the nation from the chaos beyond the border.
But as the next decades arrived, the line between them would do something no one had expected.
It would turn into a border not just between two political systems…
But between two different versions of what it meant to be modern.
Cut to black.
White text: Chapter 3 – Economic Miracles and Economic Collapse
Chapter 3 – Economic Miracles and Economic Collapse
(Full chapter as if for the documentary script / article – with Curtis-style narration, screen directions, and contextual explanations.)
Opening – When The Wrong Side Was Richer
On screen:
Black-and-white aerial shot of Pyongyang in the late 1950s. Wide new avenues, regimented apartment blocks, a riverfront promenade. Cranes dot the skyline. The shot tilts down to show a big banner with Kim Il Sung’s face and a slogan about reconstruction.
Hard cut to:
Seoul in about 1960. Muddy streets. Donkey carts and handcarts. Corrugated iron roofs. Children in ragged clothes playing next to open drains. A sign in faded paint: ‘Kim’s General Store’.
A slow, slightly sentimental 1960s Western easy-listening track begins – strings and vibraphone, like something from a travel programme.
Voice-over (calm, slightly amused):
Today, when people think of Korea, they think of smartphones and skyscrapers.
But at the beginning… the wrong side was rich.
On screen:
Graphical overlay on top of archive: simple bars showing estimated GDP per capita in the early 1960s – the north slightly above the south. (JSTOR)
Voice-over:
In the nineteen-fifties, after the war, North Korea was more industrialised than the South.
It had bigger factories.
More electricity.
And a state that promised to rebuild everything – fast. (ResearchGate)
On screen:
Workers in helmets pour molten steel in a North Korean steelworks; around them hang portraits of Kim Il Sung. The camera lingers on the glowing metal as it flows into moulds.
Voice-over:
South Korea, by contrast, was one of the poorest countries on earth.
Its economy was smaller than that of many African states. (pivot.uz)
On screen:
Seoul slums again. A US aid truck throws out sacks of flour with ‘Gift of the people of the United States of America’ printed on them. Children scramble.
Voice-over:
American officials called it an economic basket case.
Nobody imagined it would become a model.
Or that the richer, northern half would collapse into famine.
The music swells and then abruptly cuts.
Sequence – Building Socialism Out Of Rubble
On screen:
North Korean newsreel, 1954–56. Teams of workers clearing rubble in Pyongyang and Hamhung; Soviet and East German advisors in greatcoats; women in padded jackets mixing cement; children carrying bricks. (Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus)
Voice-over:
After the armistice, Kim Il Sung launched a Three-Year Plan to rebuild the country.
It was not done alone.
More than eighty percent of the industrial reconstruction was paid for with aid from the Soviet Union and other socialist allies. (Taylor & Francis Online)
On screen:
A map of the socialist bloc. Arrows come in from the Soviet Union, East Germany, China, Czechoslovakia, Hungary – labelled ‘machines’, ‘cement’, ‘engineers’.
Voice-over:
Soviet planners brought blueprints and machines.
East German engineers rebuilt the chemical city of Hamhung.
The Chinese sent labour, grain and coal. (Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus)
On screen:
Hamhung reconstruction photos. New apartment blocks rise where rubble once stood; smokestacks begin to operate again.
Voice-over (slightly dry):
North Korean propaganda said all of this was the result of the Great Leader’s genius.
In reality, it was an international development project – funded by Moscow and Beijing.
On screen:
North Korean film clips from the 1960s – idealised workers in shining factories, framed like Soviet posters. A young woman runs along a new dam, hair blowing in the wind, as trumpets blare. (Wikipedia)
Voice-over:
The films of the time show a country where everything is new.
New dams.
New power stations.
New flats.
They present North Korea as a modern socialist utopia, marching confidently towards the future. (Wikipedia)
On screen:
A famous propaganda musical, The Flower Girl. A poor but noble village girl in a spotless white hanbok trudges through snow to sell flowers, then returns to a village that – for propaganda – looks surprisingly clean and well supplied. (revistaatalante.com)
Voice-over:
The most famous of these films, like The Flower Girl, show peasants living in tidy villages, safe under the Party’s care.
There is hardship, but it is always overcome by collective effort and revolutionary spirit.
The shot freezes on Kim Il Sung’s face, as he appears in a mural within the film.
Voice-over:
What they do not show…
Is debt.
Or dependence.
Or what happens when the aid runs out.
Sequence – The South’s Nothing
On screen:
South Korea, early 1960s. Colourised if necessary. Hills stripped of trees; farmers ploughing with oxen; thatched roofs. We see the statistic on-screen in simple text: GDP per capita about 80 US dollars in 1960. (ro.uow.edu.au)
Voice-over:
At the same time, in the south, there was almost nothing.
No coal.
No oil.
Few factories that still worked.
When the war ended, South Korea’s income per person was around eighty dollars a year – one of the lowest in the world. (ro.uow.edu.au)
On screen:
A 1964 US AID film. Narrator with authoritative American voice:
‘This is Korea – a young republic struggling to feed itself…’
We see sacks of US grain, people lining up at feeding stations, children in school uniforms made from donated cloth.
Voice-over:
For the Americans, South Korea was a poor but useful frontline state in the Cold War.
For many Koreans, it felt like a defeated colony that had simply changed masters. (Wikipedia)
On screen:
Park Chung-hee visiting a dusty rural village shortly after the 1961 coup. Villagers bow; he looks serious, impatient.
Voice-over:
Park Chung-hee had seized power in a military coup.
He saw the poverty as an opportunity.
If South Korea could be turned into an efficient export machine, he believed, the country could leap ahead in a single generation. (kellogg.nd.edu)
Sequence – Turning The Country Into A Factory
On screen:
A planning meeting in the mid-1960s – recreated if necessary. Young technocrats in white shirts and thick glasses sit under a portrait of Park. Charts on the wall show Five-Year Plans, export targets, steel output.
Voice-over:
Park and his planners designed a series of Five-Year Plans.
But unlike North Korea’s plans, theirs were not about autarky.
They were about exports. (kellogg.nd.edu)
On screen:
Graph: South Korean exports in 1960 – a tiny bar, labelled 32.8 million dollars. Then bars grow: 1 billion in the early 1970s, 10 billion by 1977, climbing towards hundreds of billions by the 2000s. (korea.net)
Voice-over:
In nineteen sixty, South Korea exported almost nothing – thirty-three million dollars’ worth of goods, mostly fish and wigs made from human hair.
By nineteen seventy-seven, exports had passed ten billion dollars.
By two thousand and twenty-one, they would reach over six hundred billion. (korea.net)
On screen:
Factory footage from the 1960s and 70s. Young women sewing shirts in cramped textile factories; men welding ship hulls in Ulsan; lines of workers assembling black-and-white televisions and radios in early Samsung plants. (kellogg.nd.edu)
Voice-over:
The state gave cheap loans and protection to a handful of family-owned conglomerates – Samsung, Hyundai, LG – and told them to conquer world markets.
Economists later called these groups chaebol.
Technically, they were private companies.
In reality, they were part of a giant industrial machine run by the government. (kellogg.nd.edu)
On screen:
Corporate promotional films from the 1970s. A Hyundai shipyard launches a huge tanker. A Samsung advertisement shows a TV beaming images of the moon landing into a small Korean living room.
Voice-over:
To build this machine, Park turned the entire society into a kind of training camp.
On screen:
The New Village (Saemaul Undong) movement. Villagers in green headbands rebuild their thatched houses with orange tiles, chanting slogans, as Park watches from a jeep. (interanalytics.org)
Voice-over:
In the countryside, his Saemaul Undong – the New Village movement – organised villagers to rebuild their homes, roads and schools with their own labour.
In the cities, the message was simple.
Work harder.
Export more.
The country will grow.
Music: a cheerful 1970s Korean pop song about ‘development’ plays faintly under the narration.
Voice-over:
It worked.
Between nineteen sixty-two and nineteen eighty-nine, South Korea’s income per person rose from eighty-seven dollars to over five thousand.
GDP grew from two point three billion to more than two hundred and twenty billion dollars. (ro.uow.edu.au)
On screen:
Graph lines representing GDP per capita for North and South from 1960 to 1990. At first close together, then the southern line shooting upwards while the northern line flattens. (ro.uow.edu.au)
Voice-over:
For a while, it looked as if Park’s gamble had paid off.
Sequence – The North’s Invisible Stall
On screen:
North Korea in the 1970s. Huge parades, new apartment blocks in Pyongyang, the Tower of the Juche Idea rising over the river.
Voice-over:
At the same time, North Korea’s official films still showed a country that was marching confidently into the future.
Modern flats.
Wide boulevards.
Endless factories. (revistaatalante.com)
On screen:
Clips from North Korean propaganda films of the 1970s and 80s – workers in spotless uniforms, beaming at modern machinery; heroic youth operating lathes in slow motion; mass games in May Day Stadium spelling out slogans about production. (revistaatalante.com)
Voice-over:
But behind the images, something had gone wrong.
On screen:
Sober graphics: tables showing North Korea’s dependence on Soviet and East European trade; percentage of reconstruction needs met by foreign aid; loans taken in the 1970s. (Taylor & Francis Online)
Voice-over:
The post-war boom had depended on cheap oil, easy credit and guaranteed markets in the socialist bloc.
North Korea bought entire factories on credit – chemical plants, power stations, machine tools.
But its own products were often poor quality, and it struggled to earn enough hard currency to pay back its debts. (Encyclopedia Britannica)
On screen:
A 1970s CIA-type diagram of North Korean foreign trade – arrows between DPRK and USSR, China, Eastern Europe, growing thinner in the 1980s. (CIA)
Voice-over:
By the late nineteen-seventies, growth was slowing.
The country faced chronic energy shortages and industrial bottlenecks.
But the system could not admit failure.
The leader, and the plan, had to be infallible. (Encyclopedia Britannica)
On screen:
A North Korean news anchor in the 1980s, beaming, reports ‘fulfilment and over-fulfilment’ of production targets. Workers clap on cue.
Cut to:
Defector interview from the 2000s. A middle-aged man, face blurred. Subtitles:
‘The TV always said production was up.
But we had power cuts.
The machines stopped.
We knew they were lying. But you could not say that out loud.’ (ResearchGate)
Voice-over:
North Korea had become trapped in what economists politely call a soft budget constraint – a planned economy that cannot say no to itself.
As long as Moscow and Beijing kept the oil and money flowing, the contradictions could be hidden.
And then, one day, they stopped. (JSTOR)
Sequence – Seoul Joins The Club
On screen:
Seoul, 1988. Colour. The Olympic opening ceremony. A giant stadium full of spectators, doves being released, mass card displays, cheerleaders in neon outfits.
Voice-over:
In nineteen eighty-eight, Seoul hosted the Olympic Games.
For many South Koreans, it meant one thing – they had finally arrived.
On screen:
Montage: Seoul’s new subway, glass office towers, elevated highways, department stores full of imported goods. Western journalists wander the streets filming video diaries about the ‘Miracle on the Han River’. (Wikipedia)
Voice-over:
Foreign visitors marvelled at a country that had gone from war-ravaged poverty to middle-income affluence in a single generation.
Per capita income had risen more than sixty-fold since the early nineteen-sixties. (ro.uow.edu.au)
On screen:
A 1980s South Korean TV advert. A shiny new Hyundai car cruises along an empty highway. A young couple smile at the camera. The announcer promises a ‘new lifestyle’ for a new middle class.
Voice-over:
But the miracle had also produced something else.
On screen:
Textile workers in the 1980s sewing until late at night; students being beaten by riot police during pro-democracy demonstrations; tear gas drifting through Seoul streets.
Voice-over:
It created a new working class – of factory girls and students – who resented being told to work and study endlessly without having any real say in how the country was run.
In the nineteen-eighties, a wave of strikes and protests forced the generals to accept democratisation. (kellogg.nd.edu)
On screen:
1987 June uprising footage; huge demonstrations; Chun Doo-hwan’s regime conceding direct presidential elections.
Voice-over:
South Korea became a democracy – at least on paper.
Business and government remained tightly linked.
Debt continued to grow.
But the country was now firmly in the club of high-growth capitalist economies. (Wikipedia)
Sequence – Collapse Of The Socialist Umbrella
On screen:
Montage of late-1980s and early-1990s images: Gorbachev, Berlin Wall falling, Soviet factories idle, Eastern European crowds.
Voice-over:
Then, in the space of a few years, the world that had supported North Korea disappeared.
On screen:
Graphical lines showing Soviet oil exports to North Korea dropping after 1990; trade with Eastern Europe collapsing. (JSTOR)
Voice-over:
The Soviet Union cut off cheap oil and stopped buying North Korean goods.
Eastern European countries stopped giving aid.
What had been a cushioned, subsidised system suddenly had to stand on its own. (JSTOR)
On screen:
Satellite images of North Korea at night, early 1990s – already noticeably dim compared to the South. Electricity grids flicker.
Voice-over:
It could not.
On screen:
A simple animation of the Public Distribution System – the state-run network of grain and goods that had been supposed to feed everyone. The taps are gradually turned off, red warning symbols appear over provincial cities. (ResearchGate)
Voice-over:
The state ration system – which gave people food in return for loyalty and labour – began to break down.
Factories stopped.
Trains stopped.
The government quietly redirected what little grain it had left to Pyongyang and the army.
On screen:
1990s North Korean documentary footage – fields flooded, typhoons, landslides carrying away bridges.
Voice-over:
The regime later blamed a series of floods and disasters.
But those floods struck a system that was already unstable – heavily dependent on fertiliser, imported fuel and a dogma that could never admit mistakes. (Wikipedia)
The music fades to a low, unsettling drone.
Sequence – The Arduous March
On screen:
Grainy, smuggled VHS footage from the mid-1990s. A North Korean provincial town. People with hollow faces; children scavenging; bodies lying by the roadside under blankets. The camera jerks nervously away whenever soldiers appear.
Voice-over (very flat, letting the images work):
In the mid-nineteen-nineties, North Korea fell into famine.
The government called it the Arduous March – a heroic struggle, like the guerrilla campaigns of the past.
In reality, it was a collapse.
On screen:
Text on a black background summarising estimates:
– Population about 22 million
– Excess deaths from famine and related disease: between 240,000 and over 1 million, some estimates even higher. (Wikipedia)
Voice-over:
Researchers estimate that somewhere between a quarter of a million and over a million people died of hunger and related diseases.
Some defectors put the figure even higher.
No one knows for sure – because the state never admitted there was a famine at all. (Wikipedia)
On screen:
Interviews with defectors from documentary sources:
– A woman in her forties describing how she ate grass and tree bark.
– A former railway worker explaining how trains stopped because there was no power or food for workers. (ResearchGate)
Voice-over:
The public distribution system collapsed.
People left their assigned jobs and began to search for food instead.
Markets – jangmadang – sprang up everywhere, selling rice, corn, stolen factory goods, anything that could be traded. (NKHIDDENGULAG)
On screen:
Later 2000s footage of jangmadang markets – women behind makeshift stalls in provincial towns, selling vegetables, cigarettes, Chinese clothes. Children run between the tables. (NKHIDDENGULAG)
Voice-over:
For the first time since the revolution, ordinary North Koreans began to survive not because of the state…
But in spite of it.
A hidden market economy emerged, dominated by women who traded while their husbands stayed in useless state jobs. (NKHIDDENGULAG)
On screen:
North Korean TV drama from the 2000s. The official plot praises self-reliance and loyalty. But in the background, the set designers have quietly drawn stalls and traders into the street scenes – a rare, coded acknowledgement of the new reality. (Cha)
Voice-over:
On television, the state still showed a self-reliant socialist paradise.
In the streets, people were buying and selling to stay alive.
The centrally planned miracle had dissolved into something else: a fragile, semi-legal capitalism, erupting from below into the cracks of a starving dictatorship. (NKHIDDENGULAG)
Sequence – The South’s Crash
On screen:
Seoul skyline at night in the mid-1990s. Glowing towers, neon billboards, highways choked with traffic.
Voice-over:
At the same time, in the south, the miracle looked unstoppable.
South Korea had joined the OECD – the rich countries’ club.
Its companies were conquering global markets.
But beneath the glitter, something was wrong there too. (Wikipedia)
On screen:
Financial news graphics from 1997; graphs plunging; newspaper headlines about ‘Asia’s meltdown’.
Voice-over:
In nineteen ninety-seven, a financial panic began in Thailand.
It spread rapidly across Asia.
Investors pulled their money out of South Korea.
The currency collapsed.
Foreign reserves drained away at up to two billion dollars a day. (IMF)
On screen:
A simple line chart of South Korea’s foreign exchange reserves plunging in late 1997 to about five billion dollars. (JSTOR)
Voice-over:
South Korea – the model student of global capitalism – suddenly found itself unable to pay its short-term debts.
It had to ask the International Monetary Fund for a bailout. (IMF)
On screen:
IMF officials arriving at Incheon Airport. Protesters hold signs saying ‘We are not for sale’ and caricatures of the IMF logo as a vampire.
Voice-over:
The IMF agreed – but only on one condition: South Korea had to swallow a harsh package of reforms.
Interest rates went up.
Public spending was cut.
Banks and companies were told to restructure or die. (IMF)
On screen:
News footage from 1998.
Rows of workers in hard hats attending ‘early retirement’ meetings.
Office workers carrying card boxes out of glass towers.
Long queues at employment centres.
Text overlay: unemployment rate jumping, social safety net still thin. (dkiapcss.edu)
Voice-over:
Unemployment doubled.
Families who had believed they were secure middle class suddenly found themselves without jobs, savings or pensions.
South Korea had become modern – but without a strong welfare state.
The shock went straight into the home. (UW Courses)
On screen:
Interview from a 1998 KBS documentary. A laid-off middle manager, still in a suit but with an open collar, sits on the floor of a small apartment. Toys are scattered around. He smiles awkwardly, then starts to cry mid-sentence.
Subtitles:
‘All my life I believed that if I studied, worked hard, joined a good company, everything would be secure.
Overnight, it disappeared.’ (UW Courses)
Voice-over:
The government told people this was a necessary sacrifice – a bitter medicine that would make the economy stronger.
Many Koreans accepted it.
But they never forgot the humiliation of the IMF days. (Korea Herald)
On screen:
The famous ‘gold collection’ campaign. Housewives and businessmen lining up at banks to donate their wedding rings and family gold, melting them down to help pay the country’s foreign debts. (World Bank)
Voice-over:
Citizens brought their wedding rings and family heirlooms to government collection points.
They melted them down into bullion to pay back foreign creditors.
The miracle had turned into a morality play about responsibility and shame.
Sequence – Two Crises, One Peninsula
On screen:
Split screen.
Left: North Korean famine, mid-1990s – empty shelves, skeletal children.
Right: South Korean unemployment lines, 1998 – men in suits with briefcases, staring at noticeboards.
Voice-over:
In the nineteen-nineties, both Koreas went through economic crises.
In the north, people starved.
In the south, people were suddenly told that they were too expensive, too indebted, too slow.
On screen:
Text summaries:
North Korea
– Planned economy collapses.
– Public rations fail.
– Hidden markets emerge.
South Korea
– Debt-driven crisis.
– IMF restructuring.
– Globalised capitalism with mass layoffs. (Wikipedia)
Voice-over:
The causes were different.
But the effect was strangely similar.
Trust in the stories that had held each society together began to crumble.
On screen:
North Korean propaganda montage – smiling children, full rice bowls – overlaid with audio of defectors talking about hunger.
South Korean chaebol adverts – glamorous cars, electronics – overlaid with audio of laid-off workers talking about losing everything.
Voice-over:
In North Korea, people discovered that the fatherly state could not feed them.
In South Korea, the developmental state revealed that it had always been ready to sacrifice them to global markets.
The music shifts to a low, pulsing electronic loop.
Closing – A 50× Line
On screen:
Animated graph, 1953–2000. Two lines – North and South Korea’s estimated GDP per capita. For the first twenty years, they are close. In the 1970s, the South’s line curves upward. By 1990, it is several times higher. By 2000, it is thirty to fifty times higher, depending on estimates. (ro.uow.edu.au)
Voice-over:
By the turn of the century, the line that had once divided two equally poor halves of a ruined country now separated two different economic planets.
In the south, income per person had risen from under a hundred dollars to more than ten thousand.
In the north, it hovered somewhere between three hundred and a thousand.
The exact figures are disputed – because the regime does not publish reliable data.
But everyone agrees on the scale.
Thirty to fifty times.
On screen:
Aerial night shot of the peninsula – South Korea a blaze of light, North Korea almost black. We have seen it before, but now it has context. (Wikipedia)
Voice-over:
In less than half a century, two different ideas of modernity had produced two opposite outcomes.
One created an export powerhouse, plugged into global markets but periodically devastated by financial storms.
The other created a sealed, militarised state that could not admit failure – and ended up starving its own people while insisting that nothing was wrong.
On screen:
Split screen again.
Left: a North Korean promotional film shows a new showcase street in Pyongyang – pastel tower blocks, choreographed children with balloons. (Encyclopedia Britannica)
Right: a 2000s South Korean KBS documentary about the IMF crisis – families discussing debt, youth talking about precarious jobs. (UW Courses)
Voice-over:
Both sides tell themselves that they are models for the future.
But underneath, both are haunted by the same experience.
The feeling that the system might suddenly stop working – and no one will come to save you.
The music cuts. Silence, except for faint room tone.
White text fades up over black:
Chapter 4 – Light and Darkness
Chapter 4 – Light and Darkness
(Scripted as a full Curtis-style chapter, with narration, screen directions, periods of archive and TV footage, and enough context that a total beginner can follow.)
Opening – The Photograph Everyone Knows
On screen:
Black screen. Then, very slowly, a photograph fades in.
The famous view of the Korean peninsula at night from the International Space Station.
South Korea at the bottom: an explosion of white and golden light.
China at the top left: clusters of brightness along rivers and coasts.
In the middle: a strange dark shape, like an inland sea. Only a small, lonely island of light in its centre: Pyongyang. (NASA)
A soft, slightly kitschy 1970s synthesiser track begins – something that sounds like it was meant to be optimistic background music for a science show.
Voice-over (calm, curious):
This is the image everybody knows.
It was taken from the International Space Station in two thousand fourteen… and again in two thousand twenty-four.
It shows the Korean peninsula at night.
A blaze of light in the south.
Almost nothing in the north.
On screen:
The camera slowly zooms into the dark area. A thin bright line traces the Demilitarised Zone, visible from orbit as a seam of security lights. Below it, Seoul glows like a small galaxy. Above it, blackness. (Earth Observatory)
Voice-over:
For years, this picture has been used as proof.
Proof that capitalism works – because it produces electricity.
Proof that communism fails – because it produces darkness.
The music stops on a single sustained note.
Voice-over:
But the truth is stranger.
Because the darkness and the light are not just about money.
They are about how two systems decided to organise time, fear… and the night.
Cut to black.
Title card: Light and Darkness
Sequence – How The Lights Were Switched On
On screen:
Fast montage of South Korea in the 1960s–80s:
– Hydroelectric dams under construction;
– Transmission towers marching across hills;
– Workers pulling thick cables;
– A control room with analogue dials and blinking red bulbs.
Voice-over:
In the south, electricity became the nervous system of the Miracle on the Han River.
As factories multiplied, so did power stations and transmission lines.
On screen:
Archive stats flick briefly on screen as simple white text:
- Household electricity consumption increased more than four-fold between 1990 and 2020. (SpringerLink)
- By 2019, South Koreans’ overall energy use per person was more than thirty percent higher than the OECD average. (MDPI)
Voice-over:
By the twenty-first century, Koreans in the south were using more energy per person than the average citizen of the rich world – even though they were still earning less money.
It was a kind of over-powered modernity.
On screen:
Graphic from an energy report: bars showing per capita energy use – OECD average at around 4.06 tons of oil equivalent, South Korea at 5.4. (MDPI)
Voice-over:
The country wired itself for a life that never really stopped.
Hard cut to:
Neon-lit Seoul street at night. Camera glides past convenience stores, karaoke rooms, bars, beauty salons, and PC bangs. Everything is open. Fluorescent light spills onto the pavement.
Voice-over:
In Seoul, lights became a promise.
A promise that, no matter what time it is, you can work… study… shop… or simply stay awake.
Sequence – How The Lights Went Out
On screen:
Black-and-white footage of North Korean power plants in the 1960s: dams with water thundering through sluices, proud workers posing on turbine floors, slogans about electrification on concrete walls.
Voice-over:
In the north, it had started very differently.
After the war, North Korea built dams and power stations with Soviet and East European help.
For a while, it produced most of the electricity on the peninsula. (scholar.dsu.edu)
On screen:
Map graphic: in the 1970s, a big share of total Korean electricity output is shaded on the northern side; then an arrow moves forward in time and that share shrinks dramatically as southern output surges. (NK News – North Korea News)
Voice-over:
But the system had a hidden weakness.
It depended on imported fuel and machinery from the socialist bloc.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, the subsidies stopped.
And the lights began to go out. (scholar.dsu.edu)
On screen:
Early 1990s satellite images of North Korea – faint glows in Pyongyang, almost nothing elsewhere – crossfaded with later, even darker images. (38 North)
Voice-over:
For most North Koreans, the last thirty years have been an age of darkness.
On screen:
A defector interview on South Korean TV (Hankyoreh English edition). A man in his thirties, sitting in a Seoul café, explains that in his hometown blackouts were ‘a routine occurrence’, sometimes lasting through the night. Subtitles appear on screen. (english.hani.co.kr)
Voice-over:
Defectors say that, outside Pyongyang, twenty-four-hour blackouts used to be normal.
Even today, an energy study notes that while the capital may receive power most days – with rolling cuts – some remote areas reportedly get electricity only one day a year. (38 North)
On screen:
Daily NK photos: a dark street in Chongjin; people walking under a single weak bulb; a shot of an apartment block with just one or two windows dimly lit. (dailynk.com)
Voice-over:
In those places, night-time is not a lifestyle option.
It is simply… night.
Sequence – Per Capita: The Numbers Of Light
On screen:
Back to the ISS photograph. Now a small text box fades in with per-capita electricity consumption numbers from a UN and NASA-linked dataset:
- South Korea: about 10,000 kilowatt-hours per person per year.
- North Korea: around 700–800 kilowatt-hours per person. (Wikimedia Commons)
Voice-over (dry, almost bored):
The difference can be measured.
One analysis puts average electricity use in the south at more than ten thousand kilowatt-hours per person, compared with less than one thousand in the north.
Roughly a fourteen-to-one gap. (Wikimedia Commons)
On screen:
Bar chart appears over the peninsula image. One bar shoots up; the other barely leaves the baseline.
Voice-over:
But what those numbers do not capture… is how this feels.
The music drops to a low drone.
Sequence – Nights In Pyongyang
On screen:
Evening in Pyongyang, late 2010s. State TV footage. The showcase area around the Mansudae apartments: pastel high-rises, LED-lit fountains, coloured lights tracing the edges of buildings.
Young couples stroll beside the river. The camera moves carefully – never too far from the brightest streets.
Voice-over:
In Pyongyang, the regime has tried to create islands of light.
New high-rise apartments with coloured LEDs.
Neon-lit riverside promenades.
A carefully curated image of a modern socialist capital. (38 North)
On screen:
News clip about the completion of an 80-storey skyscraper in Pyongyang. Kim Jong Un tours an apartment; walls are pristine, lifts gleaming. The announcer praises his ‘loving care for the people’. (www.ndtv.com)
Voice-over:
The party newspaper says these towers are a gift from the Leader – proof that he is bringing modern luxury to the people.
Cut to:
International news report quoting defectors. The same towers are described as places with unreliable lifts and frequent power cuts. People do not want to live on the top floors because they might have to climb eighty flights of stairs when the electricity goes off. (www.ndtv.com)
Voice-over:
Defectors say that behind the shiny façades, the electricity system is so unreliable that residents fear getting trapped in lifts.
Living in the sky has become a punishment, not a dream.
On screen:
Night footage of a Pyongyang boulevard. The main road is lit; side streets disappear into darkness. A trolleybus clanks past. Inside, a few bare bulbs sway, flickering.
Voice-over:
Even here, in the capital, light is rationed.
Important streets and buildings are lit first – offices, party facilities, monuments.
Ordinary homes and side streets come last.
Or not at all. (38 North)
On screen:
Radio Free Asia headline about crackdowns on electricity theft. Residents who tap into factory lines are sentenced to months of hard labour; officials who sell access are also punished. (Radio Free Asia)
Voice-over:
Some people have tried to steal electricity from factory lines.
The state calls this a crime against socialist property – and punishes them with hard labour.
But the real crime, many quietly believe, is that they are being forced to pay for power and water that almost never arrive. (dailynk.com)
On screen:
Daily NK article: residents of Chongjin complaining about compulsory fees for electricity and water that do not exist. The article scrolls as we see blurred street footage in the background. (dailynk.com)
Voice-over:
In one northern city, residents complained that they were being charged monthly fees for electricity and water…
Even though the taps and the sockets were almost always dead.
Cut to:
Inside a rural house. A single battery-powered LED strip is taped to the ceiling. A car battery sits in the corner, wires trailing. A family sits under the weak light, eating quietly.
Voice-over:
Many have adapted.
They buy small solar panels from China.
Car batteries.
Home-made wiring.
The state grid becomes just one unreliable source among many, in a patchwork improvised by the people themselves. (38 North)
Sequence – Nights In Seoul
On screen:
A wide aerial shot of Seoul at night. The Han River glows, spanned by bridges lined with light. Apartment towers blaze; each window a rectangle of white or warm yellow.
A different music track fades in – upbeat 2000s K-pop, slightly detuned.
Voice-over:
In the south, electricity did something else.
It colonised the night.
On screen:
Interior of a 24-hour convenience store – GS25 or CU. Fluorescent lights, shelves stacked with instant noodles, kimbap, beer, skincare masks. Young people in school uniforms and office wear buy snacks at 1 a.m.
A vlogger films a ‘living off convenience stores for 24 hours’ challenge. (youtube.com)
Voice-over:
Convenience stores became miniature worlds – bright boxes where you can live for a day without ever going home.
You can eat, drink, charge your phone, and pay your bills.
They are open all night.
On screen:
PC bang footage. Dozens of high-end gaming PCs in a dark room, lit only by the blue glow of monitors. Teenagers and office workers in hoodies and shirts sit side by side, faces illuminated, clicking and shouting. A clock shows 3:17 a.m. (South of Seoul)
Voice-over:
PC bangs – Korean gaming cafés – advertise themselves proudly as twenty-four hours.
You can play all night for a few thousand won.
The machines never sleep.
So their users don’t either. (South of Seoul)
On screen:
Korean blog graphics: ‘PC bangs are open 24/7’ in big letters. A caption explains that many customers come after school or work, staying until dawn. (South of Seoul)
Cut to:
A hagwon corridor – private cram school. It is 10:30 p.m. Students in uniforms sit in glass-fronted rooms under harsh white lights. A teacher writes equations on a whiteboard. Outside, mothers wait in cars.
A Substack essay scrolls on screen describing this routine: school until late afternoon, then a quick meal at a convenience store, then private classes until late at night. (laseoulite.substack.com)
Voice-over:
For many teenagers, this is normal.
School.
Convenience store.
Cram school.
Repeat.
The night is not for dreams, but for catching up.
On screen:
Statistics from the Korean ministry of science and ICT:
– Household internet access around 100 percent.
– Individuals aged three and over using the internet 94.5 percent.
– Average weekly online time about 20.5 hours – nearly three hours a day. (msit.go.kr)
Voice-over:
Almost every home is connected.
Almost every person goes online every day.
Koreans now spend hours each day on the internet – much of it on smartphones.
On screen:
Digital marketing report visuals: charts showing 97–98 percent smartphone ownership; average of more than five hours per day online, with almost three hours on mobile devices. (BYYD)
Voice-over:
One recent survey says South Koreans spend over five hours a day online.
Another finds that almost eighteen percent of teenagers now use their phones more than six hours per day. (BYYD)
On screen:
Late-night subway in Seoul. Every passenger is looking at a phone. No one is talking. A child leans against a parent, eyes fixed on a screen, as the train rattles through a tunnel.
Voice-over:
The night is full of light.
But the light leads downwards – into screens.
Sequence – When Light Becomes A Problem
On screen:
News clip – the South Korean parliament in 2025. A lawmaker stands up and complains that pupils’ eyes are ‘red every morning’ because they stay on Instagram until 3 a.m. He calls for a ban on phones in school classrooms. (Reuters)
Voice-over:
By the mid-twenty-twenties, even politicians had begun to worry.
They said that children’s eyes were red every morning – not from hunger or cold, but from scrolling.
On screen:
Reuters headline about South Korea banning smartphones in classrooms from 2026 to tackle youth addiction. Another article from a French newspaper describes government-backed digital detox camps for teenagers, where phones are confiscated and replaced with group therapy, hiking and meditation. (Reuters)
Voice-over:
The country that had once been praised for its always-on connectivity now began opening state-funded ‘digital detox’ camps.
Teenagers were sent to the countryside to learn how to live without screens.
The government called them ‘Covid kids’ – a generation raised on short videos and games during lockdowns. (Le Monde.fr)
On screen:
Footage from such a camp: teenagers hiking in a forest, doing group exercises, sitting in circles writing on paper instead of typing on phones. A counsellor explains that some participants experience withdrawal symptoms when their devices are taken away. (Le Monde.fr)
Voice-over:
Official statistics show that tens of thousands of young people are now classified as at risk of Internet or smartphone addiction.
The state that once told them to compete harder now tells them to disconnect.
Cut back to:
Night shot of Seoul, seen from a hill. The city sprawls in all directions, blazing white and orange. No stars are visible.
Voice-over (quiet):
In Seoul, the lights have become so bright that many people have never properly seen the night sky at all.
Sequence – The Politics Of Darkness
On screen:
Return to the NASA and 38 North imagery. Animated series of night-light maps of North Korea from 1992 to 2020. At first, almost completely black. Slowly, small new nodes of light appear – around Pyongyang, in coastal towns, near special industrial zones. (38 North)
Voice-over:
Analysts have tracked North Korea’s night-time lights for decades.
The country is still much darker than its neighbours.
But some things are changing.
On screen:
Zoom into Pyongyang. Brightness increases over the years in certain districts. Then zoom to Nampho and other coastal areas, where small clusters of brightness appear after 2016. (38 North)
Voice-over:
New housing blocks for the elite.
Showcase tourist zones and industrial estates.
Even, according to one report, hillside fields around a notorious political prison camp – where lights suggest people may be working through the night. (dailynk.com)
On screen:
Daily NK article about Camp 22 night lights. The text scrolls while, beneath it, the satellite imagery flickers: rows of tiny lights in otherwise dark terrain. (dailynk.com)
Voice-over:
Light, in North Korea, is a resource to be allocated for political purposes.
It marks zones of prestige… and zones of punishment.
On screen:
Radio Free Asia piece about crackdowns on electricity theft; NK News / academic articles about dilapidated infrastructure; 38 North energy report emphasising severe energy deprivation for most citizens while the regime keeps promising to ‘solve the electricity problem’. (38 North)
Voice-over:
Official media constantly promises that the electricity problem will soon be solved.
It never quite is.
Instead, the regime expands showcase districts in Pyongyang and cracks down on anyone who tries to bypass the system.
Cut to:
Interview with an energy researcher on a 38 North video call. He explains that North Korea’s grid is so old and under-invested that transmission losses and outages are endemic – even when fuel is available. (38 North)
Voice-over:
The result is an upside-down modernity.
A capital city with LED-lit skyscrapers and fountains… connected to a countryside that may see real electricity once or twice a year.
Sequence – The Politics Of Too Much Light
On screen:
South Korea’s energy profile page. Charts show rising electricity generation, with nuclear and coal providing most of the power, and wind and solar lagging far behind. (Ember Energy)
Voice-over:
In the south, there is a different argument about electricity.
Not that there is too little of it…
But that there is too much.
On screen:
Environmental protest in Seoul. Young activists carry placards opposing coal-fired power stations and criticising nuclear risks, while business groups warn about blackouts if plants are shut down.
Voice-over:
Environmentalists argue that South Korea uses energy wastefully – that its dependence on coal and nuclear power is fuelling pollution and climate change.
Industry groups warn that any cutback could threaten growth. (Ember Energy)
On screen:
Shots inside a typical high-rise apartment at night. Lights are on in every room; multiple screens glow – television, tablets, smartphones, laptops – while an air conditioner hums.
Voice-over:
Ordinary life has been redesigned around constant illumination and cooling.
Apartments and offices are lit and cooled long after people have gone home.
The night has become just another shift.
Cut to:
Government PSA about energy saving – cartoon characters turning off lights, adjusting air conditioners. The tone is cheerful but slightly nagging.
Voice-over:
The state occasionally asks people to turn things off.
But the entire economic system depends on keeping them on.
Parallel Montage – Two Nights
On screen:
A long, rhythmic cross-cut sequence.
– North: A rural road in total darkness, only the Milky Way visible above. A man walks with a tiny flashlight made from a bicycle lamp.
– South: A six-lane urban road in Seoul, flooded with car headlights, LED billboards, and neon. The sky is orange.
– North: A family in a village eats dinner by candlelight because the grid has gone off again. Their faces are warm and soft, but outside the window everything is pitch black. (english.hani.co.kr)
– South: A Seoul middle-schooler falls asleep over a workbook at 1:30 a.m. in a brightly lit room, a smartphone buzzing beside their hand.
– North: A power station control room. Half the gauges are dead; a worker smokes in silence.
– South: Inside a PC bang, dozens of teenage gamers shout as they win a round of an online game; outside, a single drunk salaryman in a suit wanders past under blue light. (South of Seoul)
The music rises into a looping, unsettling chord.
Voice-over:
One half of Korea goes to bed when the power dies.
The other half cannot sleep because the power never does.
On screen:
A slow dissolve from the dark countryside to the blazing city, and back again.
Voice-over:
In the north, the darkness is physical.
It comes from a broken grid, a dilapidated energy system and a politics that treats electricity as something to be dispensed – or withheld – as a reward for loyalty. (38 North)
In the south, the darkness is psychological.
It comes from a system that keeps telling you to work, to study, to stay connected – and gives you all the light you need to do that… forever. (BYYD)
Closing – The Line Between The Stars
On screen:
Back to the high-resolution 2024 ISS photo of the peninsula. This time, we start zoomed into the starry sky above – the Milky Way arcs over the curve of the Earth. Then the camera slowly tilts down until the peninsula comes into view again: one half blazing, one half black. (Earth Observatory)
Voice-over (soft):
There is a strange irony here.
In North Korea, many people can see the stars every night.
Because there is so little artificial light.
But they cannot leave their country, or access the outside world, without risking prison or death. (38 North)
In South Korea, people are free to travel, to emigrate, to stream any film in the world.
But the night sky above their cities has disappeared into a haze of their own making. (ResearchGate)
On screen:
The DMZ as seen from orbit – the bright line of security lights, beyond it darkness, below it blazing cities.
Voice-over:
The border between the Koreas is now not just a line between two armies.
It is a line between two different ways of dealing with modernity.
One tried to restrict electricity, and ended up restricting life itself.
The other unleashed it – and now struggles to control what that light has done to people’s minds.
The music fades. The ISS image lingers for a long moment, until the lights of the south and the darkness of the north begin to blur into each other.
White text appears over black:
Chapter 5 – Information Worlds
Chapter 5 – Information Worlds
Opening – Two Different Silences
On screen:
Grainy 1950s footage.
A North Korean street, loudspeakers strapped to telegraph poles. Snow blows sideways. The speakers hiss and crackle, then a martial song about the Leader’s glory booms out over empty pavements.
Cut.
1960s Seoul.
A cramped living room. A big boxy radio sits on a lace doily. A father in shirtsleeves fiddles with the dial late at night. A voice from the North bleeds in for a moment, then a South Korean announcer interrupts with emergency messages about infiltrators and communist propaganda.
Voice-over (slow, matter-of-fact):
In both Koreas, the twentieth century began with radios and loudspeakers.
Each side tried to control what people heard.
In the North, you could only listen to one world.
In the South, the airwaves were full of fear about the other one.
The music comes in: a cold, electronic loop, like a broken ringtone stretched out for too long.
Voice-over:
But then something happened that neither regime had expected.
Information escaped the loudspeakers… and flowed into screens.
And that is when the two Koreas began to build two completely different universes of information.
Both of them were meant to keep people safe.
Instead, they created new kinds of paranoia.
Hard cut to black.
Title over black: Information Worlds
North Korea – Building A Safe Internet That Never Connects
On screen:
Colour footage from Pyongyang’s Grand People’s Study House. Rows of beige desktops. Long wooden desks. Students in neat shirts sit at Cathode-Ray Tube monitors.
The camera moves in on a browser window. The address bar shows a numeric address: 10.76.1.11.
Voice-over:
In North Korea, the internet exists.
But you are not allowed to use it.
Instead, you are given something else.
A copy.
On screen:
We see the Kwangmyong intranet home page: a simple portal interface, with Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il’s portraits at the top, links below to Naenara, Rodong Sinmun, educational pages, scientific databases.
Text on screen:
Kwangmyong – national intranet
Underneath:
Around 1,000–5,000 sites, only inside North Korea (Wikipedia)
Voice-over:
It is called Kwangmyong – Bright Light.
It was built in the early two-thousands.
It looks like the internet.
There are websites, e-mail, even a search engine…
But it is not connected to the outside world.
On screen:
A simple animated diagram:
The global internet – a huge tangled cloud.
Next to it, a tiny separate bubble labelled Kwangmyong with dots for universities, government offices, libraries. A thick firewall separates it from the global cloud.
Voice-over:
Kwangmyong runs on private network addresses that never leave the country.
Researchers estimate it has a few thousand sites – government ministries, universities, libraries, propaganda portals. (Wikipedia)
To ordinary users, it feels like a small universe full of science and ideology…
Carefully filtered from the real one.
On screen:
A foreign computer science instructor at Pyongyang University of Science and Technology is interviewed by the Associated Press. He explains that the intranet links industry, universities and government and is used mainly for spreading information, not for entertainment or free communication. (Business Insider)
Voice-over:
One foreign teacher who used it said it was there to spread information, not to let people talk to each other.
Chat rooms were briefly allowed.
When three hundred users used them to organise a flash mob for the tenth anniversary of a state website…
The chat rooms were shut down. (Wikipedia)
On screen:
A reenactment: a playful 2000s pop track plays while dozens of young Pyongyang students pour into a gymnasium for a surprise gathering arranged on Kwangmyong. Freeze-frame. Over it, newspaper text describing the ‘flash mob’ scrolls up, then a short line:
After that, the chat rooms disappeared. (Wikipedia)
Voice-over (dry):
The regime had discovered that even a fake internet could become dangerous if people used it to organise themselves.
Sealed Devices
On screen:
Close-up of a North Korean radio. The back panel is sealed with state stamps. A hand tries to turn the tuning screw but finds it blocked.
Cut to Amnesty International explainer graphics: a diagram of a state that watches phones and computers. Text highlights:
‘Domestic intranet only’ – ‘Kwangmyong’ – ‘Monitored by government agencies’ – ‘Prison if you access foreign media’. (Amnesty International UK)
Voice-over:
For decades, North Korean radios and televisions were fixed to only receive state channels.
Turning the dial too far, or adding a different antenna, could be treated as a crime. (Amnesty International UK)
Then, in the two-thousands, something even more powerful arrived.
Mobile phones.
On screen:
A 2010s KCTV segment about the success of the domestic smartphone industry. Workers in a Pyongyang factory assemble glossy black phones branded Arirang. A narrator proudly claims they are ‘made with our own technology’.
Voice-over:
By the mid-twenty-tens, millions of North Koreans had mobile phones.
Not just the elite – but traders, officials, workers. (ETH Zurich Files)
The regime discovered something new.
Phones could be used to control people’s lives far more efficiently than loudspeakers.
The Phone That Watches You
On screen:
A studio table. A single smartphone lies on a dark surface. It looks like any cheap Android handset.
Text: Obtained by BBC, smuggled out of North Korea, 2024. (www.ndtv.com)
Voice-over:
At the end of twenty-twenty-four, a North Korean smartphone was smuggled out of the country through underground networks.
The BBC gave it to security researchers.
What they found was not a phone.
It was a surveillance device that occasionally pretended to be a phone. (www.ndtv.com)
On screen:
We see screen recordings of the analysis.
A menu appears, hidden behind a code, labelled in Korean. Inside is a log of screenshots. The images flick through rapidly: weather app, messaging app, a news article, a photo gallery.
A timestamp reveals that the device has been taking screenshots every five minutes – automatically. (Fortune)
Voice-over:
The operating system had been modified by the state.
Every five minutes, it silently took a screenshot and saved it in a hidden folder that only security officials could see.
On screen:
A researcher clicks another submenu marked ‘Trace Viewer’. A timeline of opened files, videos, and photos appears – each tagged with time and location.
Voice-over:
There was a special app called ‘Trace Viewer’.
It recorded every file that had been opened, every video that had been watched, every photo that had been viewed – and when. (ResearchGate)
The phone refused to install any app that was not government-approved.
It could watermark images.
It could log keystrokes and block forbidden words.
On screen:
We see an example from the BBC report: when a user types a South Korean term for ‘South’ or ‘Republic of Korea’, the phone automatically replaces it with regime-approved language like ‘puppet state’. Warning boxes pop up. (The Sun)
Voice-over (flat):
Even vocabulary was policed.
If you wrote ‘South Korea’, the phone corrected you – to ‘puppet state’.
It was as if the device itself had been recruited by the security police.
On screen:
Short inserts from a 38 North report about a North Korean tablet: the system blocks screenshots, tracks files, prevents root access; every attempt to tamper with it leaves a trace. (38 North)
Voice-over:
Earlier research on a North Korean tablet had already shown this logic.
No screenshots.
No unauthorised apps.
Everything logged.
If phones and tablets were used the same way, the state could follow every screen people touched – in real time.
Information As Crime
On screen:
Night in a border town by the Yalu River. A shaky handheld camera looks across the water to China. Neon signs glow on the opposite bank. Smugglers’ boats slip across the dark surface.
Voice-over:
But there was a problem.
From across the river, China sent in something dangerous.
Not weapons.
Not leaflets.
USB sticks.
MicroSD cards.
Full of South Korean television dramas and pop music videos.
On screen:
A defector interview from South Korean TV. A young woman remembers how, as a teenager, she secretly watched a smuggled K-drama in her house in a provincial town.
She whispers that it was the first time she saw modern Seoul – bright, rich, full of food and romance – and realised that the South was not the hell she had been taught.
Subtitles convey her words.
Voice-over:
For many North Korean teenagers, the first real image of the world outside did not come from a news report.
It came from a soap opera about rich boys and poor girls in Gangnam.
On screen:
Radio Free Asia article headline:
‘North Korea publicly executes teenagers for watching and distributing South Korean movies.’ (Radio Free Asia)
Voice-over:
The regime responded with terror.
In twenty-twenty-two, Radio Free Asia reported that two teenagers were publicly executed by firing squad – for watching and sharing South Korean films. (Radio Free Asia)
On screen:
We hear a blurred witness describe, with voice disguised, how hundreds of villagers were forced to watch the execution at an airfield. (Radio Free Asia)
Voice-over:
A United Nations report in twenty-twenty-five said that North Korea has executed people for sharing foreign media, especially South Korean dramas.
It described a system where technology has intensified surveillance and punishment since twenty-fourteen. (Reuters)
On screen:
Clip from a YouTube news segment about two teens given twelve years of hard labour for watching K-dramas. The anchor explains that under new laws, simply viewing foreign content can bring long sentences. (youtube.com)
Voice-over:
Other reports tell of teenagers sentenced to twelve years of hard labour for doing the same thing.
In the logic of the regime, watching a love story from Seoul has become equivalent to treason.
On screen:
A montage.
A young man in Pyongyang stares at his phone in the dark, the glow reflected in his eyes.
A screenshot is taken automatically.
A log entry writes itself on the hidden system.
Somewhere in a security office, a man scrolls through a folder full of captured screens – searching for a glimpse of colour that should not be there. (Moneycontrol)
Voice-over (cold):
In the North, the danger is that you will see too much reality.
So the state uses technology to make sure the only reality you ever see… is theirs.
South Korea – Everything, All At Once
On screen:
The music changes – uptempo, sugary K-pop.
We see a glossy telecom advert from the late 2010s: young people on a rooftop in Seoul watch a holographic performance of a K-pop group through 5G glasses. The slogan flashes up:
‘Whatever you dream, 5G connects it.’
Voice-over:
In the South, the dream was the opposite.
The state wanted everyone to be connected to everything.
On screen:
A fast montage of headlines:
‘South Korea has the world’s fastest internet.’
‘97.6 percent of Koreans are online.’
‘Smartphone ownership over 97 percent, the highest in the world.’ (Wikipedia)
Voice-over:
By twenty-twenty-three, almost ninety-eight percent of the population was online.
Almost everyone had a smartphone.
South Korea had built one of the most connected societies in human history. (Wikipedia)
On screen:
Street footage:
A morning metro train in Seoul. Every passenger, from schoolkids to grandmothers, is scrolling.
A shot of a food delivery rider glancing at his navigation app.
A family in a restaurant, each person looking at their own phone.
Voice-over:
The internet became part of almost every moment of daily life – commuting, shopping, dating, politics, religion.
On screen:
Graphic from the Korean Youth Risk Behavior Survey:
Average internet usage among high school students in 2018 – about 193 minutes per day, a little over three hours. (PLOS)
Voice-over:
A large survey of high school students in twenty-eighteen found they were already spending just over three hours a day on the internet.
That was an average. Many spent much more. (PLOS)
On screen:
A study scrolls by from the National Information Society Agency: thirty-five million people completed a questionnaire. About twenty percent of the population – nearly ten million – were now considered at serious risk of internet addiction. (KQED)
Voice-over:
A government survey in twenty-eighteen concluded that almost twenty percent of the population – around ten million people – were at serious risk of internet addiction.
For teenagers, the figure was even higher. (KQED)
And yet this was the same government that had spent decades pushing people to go online.
Internet As Illness
On screen:
An older news report from 2010.
A male announcer on Korean TV explains the concept of ‘internet addiction’ – showing stock footage of boys in PC bangs with bloodshot eyes.
Text on screen:
‘Internet addiction – national crisis’
Voice-over:
Korean psychiatrists and officials began to talk about a new disease: internet addiction.
At first, they used the word for hard drugs.
On screen:
Pages flash up from a national survey:
– Around twelve percent of adolescents classed as addicted to the internet.
– Eight percent of adults. (PMC)
Voice-over:
Early nationwide surveys suggested that around twelve percent of adolescents, and eight percent of adults, were already addicted. (PMC)
On screen:
Seoul city government webpage. A table shows internet addiction among schoolchildren dropping from about ten percent in 2009 to 5.4 percent in 2011 after prevention programs. (서울정책아카이브 Seoul Solution)
Voice-over:
Municipal governments began running prevention programs in schools, boasting that their campaigns were reducing addiction rates.
But the overall numbers kept growing.
On screen:
NPR / KQED online article:
‘Almost 20% of the population at serious risk of Internet addiction, government survey says’ (KQED)
Voice-over:
By twenty-nineteen, the latest figures said that almost one in five South Koreans was at serious risk.
The Camps
On screen:
A misty mountain valley in Muju, North Jeolla Province. Pine trees. A low complex of modern dormitory buildings.
Text:
National Center for Youth Internet Addiction Treatment – Internet Dream Village, Muju (Korea Herald)
Voice-over:
The solution was something that looked like a summer camp.
The government called it the National Center for Youth Internet Addiction Treatment.
The teenagers who were sent there called it something else.
On screen:
ABC news footage from 2015. A group of teenagers in hoodies stand in formation in a yard. A counsellor leads them through group exercises. The reporter explains that their phones have been confiscated; they will stay here for several weeks. (ABC)
Voice-over:
Their parents, or their teachers, report them as addicts.
When they arrive, they have to hand over their phones and laptops.
One boy told a reporter that the first day was like being captured.
He said: ‘My future is pitch-black.’ (The Washington Post)
On screen:
Washington Post report from 2016. A teenage boy in a tracksuit, Yoon Yong-won, describes his nightmares at the camp: in his dreams he is still playing games on his phone, but when he wakes up, his hands are empty. (The Washington Post)
Voice-over:
At night he dreamt he was still playing games.
But when he woke up, his hands were empty.
On screen:
Le Monde article from 2025. It describes Internet Dream Village and another centre known as National Youth Internet Dream Village – teenagers do counselling, group therapy, hikes, crafts, meditation. Covid lockdowns have created a new generation of ‘Covid kids’ hooked on short videos and games. (Le Monde.fr)
Voice-over:
A French newspaper visited ten years later and found that the camps were still there.
Now they were full of Covid kids – children whose social lives had been replaced by short videos and mobile games during lockdown.
The state pays hundreds of dollars per teenager to keep them here for weeks.
It is like a tiny welfare state built to treat a problem created by the rest of the economy. (Good Game Hotspot)
On screen:
Inside a therapy session. Teenagers sit in a circle on the floor, talking about how many hours they used to spend online. A counsellor draws a diagram of ‘self-control’ on a whiteboard.
Voice-over:
The teenagers confess their screen time.
Three hours a day.
Seven hours a day.
Twelve hours a day.
They are taught breathing exercises.
They learn to play board games.
They are told that they must learn to control themselves – so that the country can keep its dream of being permanently online.
Laws That Switch The Phone Off
On screen:
Parliament in Seoul, 2011. Lawmakers debate a bill while, outside, gaming industry lobbyists complain to reporters.
Voice-over:
At the same time, the state tried to legislate against the night.
On screen:
Graphics explaining the so-called Cinderella law – a midnight to 6 a.m. gaming curfew for under-sixteens, forcing game companies to block minors during those hours. News clips mention that it was eventually repealed after criticism. (KQED)
Voice-over:
The Cinderella law banned children under sixteen from online games after midnight.
Game companies had to block them; parents had to sign new forms.
It was quietly rolled back later – after protests from the industry and from teenagers.
On screen:
Now 2025. Reuters footage from the National Assembly. A lawmaker warns that ‘our kids’ eyes are red every morning; they are on Instagram until two or three a.m.’ The chamber laughs nervously as he calls for an outright phone ban in classrooms. (Reuters)
Voice-over:
By twenty-twenty-five, things had gone further.
One opposition lawmaker told parliament:
‘Our kids, their eyes are red every morning. They are on Instagram until two or three a.m.’ (Reuters)
On screen:
Headline:
‘South Korea to ban mobile phones in school classrooms nationwide from March 2026.’ (Reuters)
Voice-over:
That same week, lawmakers passed a bill banning smartphones and digital devices from school classrooms, starting in twenty-twenty-six.
Surveys showed that more than a third of middle- and high-school students felt social media was already affecting their daily lives.
One in five said they felt anxious if they could not access it. (Reuters)
On screen:
We see a classroom.
A basket at the front, full of confiscated phones.
Students sit at desks, staring uneasily at the blackboard, their fingers twitching.
Voice-over:
In the country with one of the highest smartphone ownership rates on earth, the state had begun to create tiny islands of disconnection – just for school hours.
Two Information Prisons
On screen:
Split screen.
Left:
North Korea.
A Kwangmyong terminal in a library. A middle-aged man searches for articles praising Kim Il Sung’s economic thought. On the wall behind him, a poster warns that accessing foreign information is a crime. (Wikipedia)
Right:
South Korea.
A PC bang at 1 a.m. A girl in school uniform plays an online game, an energy drink can next to the keyboard. Behind her, a poster warns about ‘internet addiction’ and advertises a hotline. (KQED)
Voice-over:
Both systems used technology to manage fear.
In the North, the fear was of contamination – that foreign words and images would infect the population and destroy the regime.
So they built a sealed copy of the internet, and turned every phone into an informant. (Wikipedia)
In the South, the fear was of addiction – that the same networks which had made the country rich were now making its children ill.
So they built detox camps and bans, while leaving the rest of the system completely intact. (KQED)
On screen:
A montage, tightly cut to an anxious ambient track:
– North Korean state TV reading out a list of new punishments for ‘reactionary culture’. (Reuters)
– South Korean TV talk show where exhausted parents discuss their children’s screen habits.
– A defector describing watching K-dramas in secret and realising the South is modern and prosperous. (Radio Free Asia)
– A teenager at Muju camp telling a journalist that he feels ‘captured’ but also relieved that someone is taking the phone away. (The Washington Post)
Voice-over:
In Pyongyang, people risk their lives to watch foreign dramas on USB sticks, knowing that a single screenshot on their phone could send them to a camp. (Radio Free Asia)
In Seoul, parents voluntarily send their children to camps… because the children are unable to put the phone down. (KQED)
Closing – The Screen As Mirror
On screen:
The split-screen collapses into one frame: a close-up of a thumb swiping on a glass surface.
First, it is a North Korean phone, scrolling through a page of slogans on Kwangmyong.
Then it morphs into a South Korean smartphone, scrolling through Instagram and TikTok.
The gesture is identical.
Voice-over (soft, reflective):
Looked at from above, the Korean peninsula still appears as light and darkness.
But inside the homes on both sides, the reality is less simple.
In the North, the state has tried to build a safe information world by sealing it off completely – and turned every device into a potential witness for the prosecution.
In the South, the state has tried to build a free information world by connecting everything – and discovered that people cannot easily live with that much freedom.
On screen:
The thumb keeps swiping.
Cut abruptly to a blank CRT screen in an old library in Pyongyang.
Then to a smartphone lock screen in Seoul showing a notification:
Screen time last week: 7 h 34 m per day
Voice-over:
Both information worlds are unstable.
One is terrified that people will see too much.
The other is terrified that people cannot stop looking.
Music fades into a deep, low note.
White text on black:
Chapter 6 – Bodies, Faith and Cults
Chapter 6 – Bodies, Faith and Cults
The music is church-organ heavy, slightly distorted.
On screen, we are inside Kumsusan Palace of the Sun in Pyongyang.
The camera glides slowly along the moving walkways. There are no adverts, no sound except shuffling feet and the low hum of machinery. People in their best suits and dresses float forward on the conveyor belts, expressionless, hands glued to their sides. Ahead, in a huge icy chamber, lies the glass sarcophagus. The embalmed body of Kim Il Sung, lit from beneath, skin the colour of wax fruit.
Adam Curtis–style voice:
In North Korea, the state did something that used to belong only to religion.
It took a dead body.
And it refused to let it die.
The camera cuts to a second chamber: Kim Jong Il, preserved in the same humid glow. A woman in a black suit begins to sob, her shoulders shaking. A soldier beside her stares straight ahead, eyes glassy.
We hear the shuffle of thousands of cloth slippers on polished granite.
The rulers of North Korea built a mausoleum where the bodies of the leaders lie in state, not for days, but for decades.
And every year, people are brought here in endless lines, to bow three times to the bodies.
They file past them in silence, like pilgrims at a shrine. (Reuters)
The scene holds uncomfortably long, as visitors bow at the feet, then the left side, then the right, watched by guards in perfect formation.
Cut sharply to Seoul, seen from above on a Sunday.
The music snaps to a bright, tinny gospel band.
On screen, Yoido Full Gospel Church: a vast, modern auditorium that looks like a sports arena crossed with an airport terminal. The camera cranes down over thousands of worshippers waving their hands in the air. A choir of hundreds sings; giant LED screens show the pastor’s face, sweating under studio lights.
Across the border, another group of men built something else.
Not a mausoleum.
But what became the biggest Protestant church in the world.
Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul claims hundreds of thousands of members, with services that look like rock concerts, streamed online to believers around the globe. (Wikipedia)
We cut between the two spaces.
Kumsusan. Dark maroon carpets, red flags, the sound of a loudspeaker inside an echoing marble hall.
Yoido. Neon-lit cross, a band rehearsing; camera operators on cranes swing over chanting worshippers.
The voice stays level, almost bored.
Both places are about bodies.
In Pyongyang, the bodies of two dead men.
In Seoul, the bodies of the living, swaying and crying and raising their hands to an unseen God.
Each side is convinced that their rituals hold the secret to salvation.
Political religion in the North
The image flickers to black-and-white footage from the 1960s.
On screen, Kim Il Sung stands on a balcony, grinning and waving. Below him, a sea of people clap in perfect rhythm. Behind him, a giant portrait of his own face is carried across the crowd like a medieval icon.
After the war, Kim Il Sung created something that looked like communism.
But over time it began to resemble something else.
A political religion.
We cut to a title card, designed in severe socialist typography.
White on black:
‘Year 1 – Juche 1’
Underneath: ‘Gregorian 1912’
In 1997, the North Korean state quietly changed time.
It adopted a new calendar called Juche.
The year 1912 – when Kim Il Sung was born – became Year 1.
Official dates were now counted from his birth, not from the birth of Christ. (Wikipedia)
On screen, a calendar page is overlaid on footage of a mass rally. We see dates stamped as ‘Juche 104’, ‘Juche 110’, while state television footage of parades rolls underneath.
Now we cut to a modern, HD clip from North Korean news.
On screen, Kim Jong Un walks slowly along the red carpet at Kumsusan, surrounded by generals. He places a flower basket in front of statues of his father and grandfather, then bows. The subtitles read: ‘Respected Comrade Kim Jong Un pays highest tribute on the Day of the Shining Star.’ (Reuters)
The leaders’ birthdays became the biggest holidays of the year.
The Day of the Sun for Kim Il Sung.
The Day of the Shining Star for Kim Jong Il.
They were marketed as festivals for the whole nation.
Like Christmas.
Except that the gods were now the Kims.
The music dips and changes – a warped children’s choir.
On screen, brightly coloured North Korean animation from state television: smiling children gather around a drawing of Kim Il Sung in the clouds. The narrator in Korean says, in syrupy tones, that the General is like the sun, shining on the children forever.
We cut back to the real world. A defector interview from South Korean TV: a woman in her thirties, face blurred, explaining that at school they were taught songs calling Kim Il Sung ‘our father’ and his mother ‘our mother’.
The English subtitles crawl across the image.
She says:
‘We were told that Kim Il Sung’s mother is the mother of all Korean children. So you have to love her more than your own.’ (Wikipedia)
The voice continues.
In many religions, God is a father.
North Korea went further.
It created a state that tried to be both father and mother.
Kim Il Sung was the father of the nation.
His mother, Kang Pan-sok, was turned into the mother of the revolution.
And later, Kim Jong Il’s mother, Kim Jong-suk, became a kind of revolutionary Madonna, honoured on special days, when ordinary mothers were forgotten. (Wikipedia)
Now we see a strange cut.
On screen, an official wreath-laying ceremony at the Chilgol Revolutionary Site, honouring Kang Pan-sok. Uniformed children place flowers at a statue of a woman holding a book, their faces carefully serious. (Wikipedia)
Smash cut to grainy footage from a Western tabloid interview with a defector in Seoul. Tabloid graphics announce: ‘No Christmas – only Kim’s grandma’.
The defector explains that celebrating Christmas is banned, and that instead people are told to commemorate Kim Jong Un’s grandmother, Kim Jong-suk, on 24 December. Even knowing what Christmas is, he says, can be dangerous. (Wikipedia)
In most countries, Christmas is about a child born in a stable.
In North Korea, 24 December became about the grandmother of the Supreme Leader.
If you celebrated Christmas, defectors say, you risked prison, or worse.
But you were encouraged to toast the dead grandmother of a man you had never met.
A blurred screenshot from a foreign social-media post in Korean. Emojis pile up under a story that claims Kim Jong Un once ordered women to walk the streets without smiling for several days before a speech about having more children – a rumour that cannot be verified but is shared and reshared as dark comedy.
Voice-over:
Outside, people turn these stories into memes to cope with the absurdity.
Inside North Korea, no one would dare laugh about them in public.
We see four state-approved churches in Pyongyang – one Catholic, three Protestant, and one Russian Orthodox – filmed by foreign TV crews. The services look real enough: choirs, crosses, candles. But the camera lingers on the rows of tourists and foreign diplomats in the front pews. The guide explains that there is full religious freedom. (Wikipedia)
Then the archive shifts.
On screen, a satellite map, computer graphics picking out prison camp complexes. Overlaid are testimonies from defectors about Christians discovered with illegal Bibles, entire families sent to labour camps. Subtitles mention the Open Doors World Watch List, ranking North Korea as the most dangerous place on earth to be a Christian, scoring 98 out of 100 for persecution. (Open Doors)
In public, North Korea shows visiting journalists a handful of churches.
In private, it runs one of the harshest systems of religious repression in the world.
A global Christian watchdog says it has been number one on its list of the most dangerous places to be a Christian for almost thirty years.
Owning a Bible can send not only you, but your children, to a camp.
We see testimony from a young defector in London, interviewed by a human rights NGO. He describes being taught that Christianity is a tool of American imperialism, and that Christians are spies trying to destroy the country from within. (ABC)
In this world, Christianity is not just a rival religion.
It is treason.
Because it suggests there is a higher loyalty than the Kim family.
The music changes again – now to something slightly ridiculous.
On screen, a North Korean state TV documentary from the 1990s. An announcer describes Kim Jong Il’s miraculous achievements. Graphics show him on a golf course, animated arrows tracing the perfect path of eleven holes-in-one in a single game. In another clip, a narrator earnestly claims that the leaders do not defecate, because they are too pure. (NK News – North Korea News)
The voice does not laugh.
The propaganda became stranger and stranger.
State media reported that Kim Jong Il once scored eleven holes-in-one on his first ever round of golf.
And that the leaders’ bodies were so perfect they did not even defecate.
These absurd stories were not jokes.
They were repeated as truth.
Because in this system, the leader’s body had become something close to a god.
Religion and markets in the South
Cut to Seoul in the 1980s, filmed on analogue video.
On screen, a vast open-air rally. Tens of thousands of people wave South Korean flags and hold up crosses. A militant evangelical pastor preaches against communism, shouting into a microphone. Behind him, a massive banner links Christianity to anti-communist patriotism.
In South Korea, religion took a very different path.
The state never embalmed its leaders.
But it did allow something else to grow very big.
We fade into a modern drone shot of Seoul at night: rivers of headlights along the Han, neon crosses on almost every horizon.
Graphic overlay:
‘South Korea – religions (2015 census):
Protestant 19.7%
Catholic 7.9%
Buddhist 15.5%
None 56%’ (IndexMundi)
By the early twenty-first century, just under half of South Koreans said they followed a religion.
The biggest group were Protestants, then Buddhists, then Catholics.
But the real winner was something else:
people who believed in no official religion at all – more than half the country. (Wikipedia)
On screen, we see the raw numbers from the 2015 census, scrolling across the bottom, while the camera roams the streets of Seoul, cross after cross blinking in red and blue. (Wikipedia)
Inside Yoido Full Gospel Church again, we watch a pastor pacing a vast stage as subtitles translate a sermon about prosperity and blessing. He tells the crowd that God will reward those who give generously to the church, and that Korea’s economic miracle is a sign of divine favour.
Cut to a quiet room where a church official shows a foreign journalist statistics: up to 580,000 members, between 150,000 and 200,000 worshippers across multiple Sunday services, hundreds of pastors, and thousands of cell groups meeting in homes across Seoul. (Wikipedia)
Churches like Yoido told a simple story.
If you worked hard, believed in Jesus, and tithed to the church, you could be saved – both spiritually and economically.
It was a kind of religious version of the growth miracle that was transforming the country.
Then we cut to something less heroic.
News footage from Seoul, 2016. Protesters hold candles and placards calling for the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye. Among the crowd we see evangelical counter-protesters waving flags and singing hymns in support of the president. Commentators talk about the influence of conservative pastors, some of whom had previously led anti-communist rallies and now lead pro-government marches. (State Government)
Over time, some of these pastors moved from the pulpit into politics.
They mobilised their congregations against communism, against North Korea, and later against progressive governments in Seoul.
They turned faith into a voting bloc.
The camera cuts rapidly between images.
A shamanic ritual at a rural shrine; an evangelical revival meeting with lasers; politicians bowing at Buddhist temples during election campaigns.
In official statistics, Korea looks neatly divided into Christians, Buddhists and the non-religious.
But underneath, older forces persist – shamanism, ancestor worship, fortune-telling.
Politicians sometimes consult shamans in secret.
Some of the biggest scandals in South Korean politics have involved shadowy religious advisers. (Wikipedia)
The images start to blur into one another: incense smoke in a temple, dry ice on a church stage, neon in a shopping mall.
The cult of the body
The music shifts to something like a slowed-down K-pop track.
On screen, we see a long shot of a North Korean mass games performance in May Day Stadium. Tens of thousands of gymnasts move in perfect synchronization, their bodies forming abstract patterns. In the background, a giant card mosaic shows Kim Il Sung smiling benevolently, rays of light emanating from his head.
In North Korea, the body was not individual.
It was a tiny piece of a vast, synchronised organism.
At the Arirang mass games, tens of thousands of people moved in perfect patterns to form the face of the leader.
From above, it looked beautiful.
From below, it was exhausting.
We zoom into individual gymnasts: sweat on their foreheads, a girl grimacing as she holds a pose.
Cut abruptly to Gangnam, present day.
On screen, daytime street shots of Seoul’s plastic surgery district: glass towers covered in glossy adverts for clinics, giant posters of idealised faces with huge eyes and V-shaped chins. A moving camera passes sign after sign advertising ‘double eyelid’, ‘jaw reduction’, ‘V-line’, ‘anti-ageing laser’.
In South Korea, the body became something else.
It turned into a project.
The country developed one of the highest rates of cosmetic surgery per person in the world.
Studies suggest around one in five South Koreans has had some form of cosmetic procedure, with nearly a quarter of young women going under the knife, or the laser. (Wikipedia)
We watch a clip from a beauty tourism documentary. A British influencer walks into a Gangnam clinic, filming herself on a phone. A consultant traces imaginary new jawlines and eyelids on a tablet, while a translator explains the packages. The influencer laughs nervously.
Overlay graphics mention that in 2024 there were hundreds of dermatology clinics in Seoul alone, and that beauty tourism brings in over a hundred thousand foreign patients a year seeking cheaper, cutting-edge treatments. (Marie Claire UK)
Seoul became a global pilgrimage site for beauty.
Tourists flew in from Europe, China and the Middle East, drawn by cheaper prices and the promise of a perfect face – what marketers started to call the new ‘K-face’. (Business Insider)
The camera now intercuts in a tight rhythm.
A North Korean woman in a plain, boxy suit, hair curled into the standard permissible style, standing in front of a mural of Kim Il Sung.
A South Korean woman in her twenties, filmed for a lifestyle programme, walks the streets in a pastel outfit, her face heavily made up, describing the surgeries she has had – eyelids, nose, chin filler – and the ones she still wants.
In North Korea, there is only one ideal body – the body of the leader.
Ordinary people are supposed to disappear into the crowd.
In South Korea, there are millions of ideal bodies – the faces of idols and celebrities on posters and phone screens.
Ordinary people are told they can become one of them.
If they pay.
We see a consulting room where a woman is told that her jaw is ‘too square’, her nose ‘too flat’, her eyes ‘too small’. Then we cut to an old propaganda film from the North praising women who look strong and plain and carry baskets of corn.
The juxtaposition hangs in silence.
Two kinds of worship
The music changes again. A faint K-pop beat underlaid with a low drone.
At first we see a North Korean hymn.
On screen, a glossy state TV broadcast: a choir of women in traditional hanbok sing in front of giant images of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. The camera zooms slowly into a single singer, eyes shining with what could be tears, or simply the bright studio lights.
In Pyongyang’s studios, songs praise the leader as a caring father.
They describe how he came to the villages, held the children, and fed the hungry.
They sing about his heart.
The lyrics on screen refer to Kim Il Sung as ‘our sun’ and ‘our father’. (Wikipedia)
Then we cut to a BTS stadium concert.
The camera swoops over an entire sea of purple light sticks, pulsing in coordinated patterns. The members on stage speak softly about self-love and mental health. Fans scream and cry, some in tears, clutching banners that say ‘You saved me’.
At the same time, in Seoul and Los Angeles and London, millions of young people gather to worship something else.
Not a god.
And not a president.
But a group of young men.
BTS.
We see close-ups of fans’ faces – many in their teens and twenties – mouthing every lyric, their light sticks held aloft like candles. Academic text appears briefly on screen, taken from a recent psychology study: fandom gives a sense of belonging and purpose, but also creates pressure and obsessive comparisons. (sijmds.com)
Researchers have begun to describe K-pop fandoms as something like a new religion.
They have rituals – light sticks, chants, birthdays of idols celebrated worldwide.
They offer meaning and community in a world of precarious jobs and exam anxiety.
And they demand time, money and devotion.
We watch clips of ARMY fans organising charity drives, streaming parties, and political campaigns on social media. Hashtags flash across the screen in multiple languages.
Then we return, briefly, to the North.
A secretly filmed house church: three or four people in a dark room, whisper-singing a Christian hymn. A Bible is hidden inside a cushion. Faces are blurred.
In one Korea, worship of anything other than the leader happens in secret, in whispers, in the shadows.
In the other, worship has filled stadiums and global social networks, but often not for God – for human idols, whose faces can be monetised.
The mother, the mirror and the body
The music fades to a simple piano loop.
On screen, two domestic scenes.
First, a North Korean living room, shot by a defector returning secretly with a hidden camera. On the wall, at eye level, hang the mandatory portraits of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. The camera lingers as a woman carefully dusts the frames with a special cloth, more gently than she touches her own children. (Wikipedia)
Second, a tiny Seoul apartment. A young woman sits at a dressing table covered in skincare bottles and makeup brushes. Above the table is a collage of K-pop idols and Instagram influencers. She stares into a ring-light mirror, filming a skincare routine for her followers.
The voice draws the parallel slowly.
In North Korea, every home must have portraits of the leaders.
Officials visit to check they are clean and correctly displayed.
If they are dusty, it can mean trouble.
The leader’s face is more important than your own. (Wikipedia)
We see archival footage of North Korean propaganda explaining that saving the portraits from a fire is a citizen’s first duty.
In South Korea, no one checks your walls.
But millions of people cover them anyway – and their phone screens – with other faces.
Not the state’s.
But the faces of singers, actors and models whose lives seem more real and more perfect than their own.
The Seoul woman in the flat films herself, carefully tapping serum into her skin, explaining which procedure she is saving up for next. In another clip, she talks about feeling ugly in school until she had surgery. (Wikipedia)
The narration becomes more reflective.
Both systems say they are about liberation.
One says it has liberated people from the old feudal gods and the humiliation of empire, by giving them a revolutionary father and mother to worship instead.
The other says it has liberated people from poverty and dictatorship, by giving them freedom of religion – and the freedom to reinvent their own faces, if they can afford it.
We see a North Korean child in a school uniform, kneeling to place flowers in front of a statue of Kim Il Sung’s mother; then a South Korean teenager scrolling through cosmetic clinic before-and-after photos on a phone. (Wikipedia)
But in both worlds, the human body has become the main battlefield.
In the North, the state claims your body belongs to the revolution, and that your mind belongs to the leader.
In the South, the market tells you your body is your own –
and then quietly explains that it is not good enough yet.
The last shot of the chapter is a split screen.
On the left, a North Korean crowd in a stadium forms an enormous portrait of Kim Il Sung, each person holding a coloured card above their head, perfectly aligned.
On the right, a South Korean stadium at night: a BTS concert, where tens of thousands of people raise light sticks to form a shimmering purple ‘ocean’.
The music mixes the North Korean marching song with a BTS chorus, detuned until they almost merge.
Seen from above, the two crowds look strangely similar.
Two oceans of tiny bodies, moving as one, creating images for the cameras.
One sings about a leader who never dies.
The other sings about love and self-belief.
Both are convinced they are free.
Both are part of a story written for them by forces they did not choose.
The screen holds the twin images for a moment longer than feels comfortable.
Then it cuts to black.
Chapter 7 – Daily Lives: Mobility, Housing, Work
We fade up, very slowly, on a dark corridor.
On the left, a metal door with peeling green paint, an inminban noticeboard and a hand-written rota for cleaning the stairwell.
On the right, a bright plastic door with a keypad lock and a sticker that says ‘Goshiwon’.
The corridor is the same width. The doors are almost the same size.
But behind them are two completely different experiments in how a human life should be organised.
7.1 Morning: Learning Where You Are Allowed To Go
On screen – North
A loudspeaker mounted on a concrete pole cracks and hisses.
We cut to a North Korean housing block at dawn: grey, damp, the paint flaking. A woman in a padded jacket and plastic sandals sweeps the courtyard. Another pins a fresh sheet of paper on the inminban noticeboard – the list of households in the neighbourhood group, and what they are supposed to do this week.
Underneath, people gather in a small crowd. They are being reminded to attend ideological study. And to report anyone who travels without permission.
Every household in North Korea belongs to one of these small cells – thirty or forty homes grouped into what is called an inminban. Officially, they are for cleaning and community work. In reality, they are also the state’s eyes and ears: every resident is watched by their neighbours, and one person in each block reports back to the security services. (38 North)
Voice-over
The regime did something simple.
It took the idea of a street committee – a residents’ association – and turned it inside out.
In most countries, people use them to complain about rubbish collection, or noisy neighbours.
In North Korea, they were taught that their job was to complain about each other.
On screen – South
Hard cut to a Seoul subway map. Coloured lines wriggle like neon spaghetti. The camera zooms out until the whole city is covered in train routes.
Then: rush hour. Inside Line 2 at 8:30 a.m. Rows of commuters, packed tightly, scrolling on phones. A polite recorded voice apologises for the delay.
Students in hoodies. Office workers in dark suits. A delivery rider in a branded jacket, half-asleep, holding his helmet.
Outside, a KTX bullet train slices through the countryside, the LCD sign inside casually showing 297 kilometres per hour.
Voice-over
On the other side of the border, the state did the opposite.
It filled the landscape with speed.
It built eight-lane highways, subways, and one of the fastest high-speed rail networks on earth.
And it told people: your job is to move.
From home to cram school. From cram school to office. From office to another office.
As long as you kept moving, you were free.
On screen – contrast
Split screen.
Left: a North Korean internal train, filmed secretly through a carriage window – wooden seats, a coal stove, people sitting on sacks of grain. A guard in a fur hat checks papers.
Right: a KTX carriage – soft seats, laptop screens, iced coffees in cup-holders, a group of young people watching a drama together on a tablet.
Tiny white text appears at the bottom of the left image:
‘Travel certificate required to leave city. Violations can mean fines or detention.’ (State Department)
We see a scan of a yellowed North Korean travel permit – name, origin, destination, dates – stamped by a local People’s Security office. Those leaving Pyongyang must show this at checkpoints; those entering must also be approved. (The Guardian)
Voice-over
To go from one town to another in the North, you often need a piece of paper.
In theory, it is just to manage transport.
In practice, it decides who is allowed to see the country – and who is allowed to disappear.
In the South, there are no checkpoints.
But there is something else.
You can move as much as you like.
The problem is: you may never stop.
7.2 Cars You Cannot Own, Roads You Cannot Leave
On screen – North
A wide avenue in Pyongyang. Soviet-style apartment towers, pastel blue and mint green. A tram clanks past. There are almost no private cars – only a few black sedans and a bus.
Traffic policewomen in white hats stand in the middle of empty crossroads, directing invisible congestion with theatrical arm gestures.
We cut to archive footage from the 1980s: the same junction, also almost empty.
A caption flickers up:
‘Most vehicles belong to the state, not to individuals.’ (The Guardian)
A Guardian reporter’s voice, from an old piece, explains that almost everyone walking to work passes the same poster of Kim Il Sung every day – and that anyone travelling out of Pyongyang needs a travel certificate. (The Guardian)
Then: recent video from Pyongyang’s new, more colourful districts – a few shiny SUVs, a Mercedes, young elites in sunglasses stepping out in designer trainers. Local media reports of “new private taxi services” flash briefly. (dailynk.com)
Voice-over
For decades, private cars in the North were almost mythical objects. Someone else’s cousin’s boss had one.
You saw them in films. Or in the distance, carrying officials.
The streets belonged to the army, the Party – and to the portraits.
But as the markets grew, a strange thing happened.
Some people became rich.
And a tiny new class started to appear: men in leather jackets with sunglasses… stuck in Pyongyang traffic.
On screen – South
Now we cut to Seoul at street level – a time-lapse of cars clogging Gangnam at rush hour, red brake lights stretching into the distance. Motorbikes weaving between lanes, food delivery boxes stacked high.
Then we see an overhead shot of dozens of green and white delivery scooters, all lined up outside convenience stores, engines idling.
Delivery apps, ride-hailing logos, subway timetables and airline booking pages flash over the image like a cascade of windows.
Voice-over
In the South, mobility became something else again.
It was not just a right.
It was a product.
You bought it with fuel, and time, and your back.
At night, armies of riders carried fried chicken and bubble tea across the city – so that other people did not have to move at all.
We cut to a Korean TV news segment about delivery riders’ accidents; the anchor reads out that they are under pressure to meet algorithmic deadlines, paid per order, in a labour market already famous for long hours. (World Economic Forum)
Then back to the almost empty Pyongyang avenue, where one lonely bicycle passes beneath a portrait of Kim Jong Il.
7.3 Housing: Who Decides Your Room
On screen – North: the flat you are given
We move through a model flat in Pyongyang shown on state television: a shining new apartment, with framed photos of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il on the wall, a glass cabinet of glasses that will never be used, a balcony with a view of the Taedong River.
A smiling couple explain to a state TV interviewer that they have just been “gifted” this home by Marshal Kim Jong Un.
In the countryside, though, defector testimony and satellite images show something different: low, concrete apartment blocks, villages with one-storey houses, yards piled with firewood because heating is unreliable. (hrnk.org)
A former resident explains in interview that ordinary people do not buy homes on an open market – housing is allocated by the state, and the best apartments go to those with good songbun and loyalty: party cadres, military officers, people connected to the security services. (hrnk.org)
Voice-over
In North Korea, where you live is not a question of money.
It is a question of biography.
If your grandfather fought with Kim Il Sung, you may get a new apartment on a showpiece street.
If he was a landlord, or a Christian, or disappeared in the war… you may find yourself in the hills, in a house the cameras never visit.
Real estate here is a form of reincarnation.
Your ancestors move in before you do.
We briefly cut back to the inminban list on the stairwell. The head of the block uses it to assign cleaning duties – and to keep track of who is supposed to be living in each flat. Anyone staying overnight without the correct registration risks being reported. (38 North)
On screen – South: the room you can just about afford
Hard cut to a vertical forest of Seoul apartment towers – beige and white, numbered like storage units, surrounded by cranes. A banner on one reads ‘New Pre-sales – Register Now’.
Then a simple animation explains jeonse: instead of paying monthly rent, many tenants in Korea pay a huge lump-sum deposit to the landlord, live “rent-free” for two years, and then get the deposit back – if the landlord has not gone bankrupt or vanished. (The Yale Review of International Studies)
As housing prices soar and interest rates change, news clips show families driven into smaller and smaller spaces, or into heavy debt, just to secure a place in the right school district. (LGiU)
Now we move inside a goshiwon – a micro-room near a university in Seoul.
The camera squeezes through the door: a single bed, a desk, shelving, and, in the corner, a tiny glass cubicle with a toilet and shower jammed together. You can touch all four walls without taking a step. (Korea Herald)
A YouTube vlogger cheerfully narrates a “Goshiwon Room Tour”, explaining that the room is about 2.5 square metres; another foreign grad student gives an interview about her 77-square-foot micro-apartment in Seoul, decorated in pink and purple, which she calls a “cozy cocoon”. (New York Post)
Voice-over
In South Korea, housing became a financial instrument.
An apartment is not just where you live.
It is your pension, your savings, and your status – stacked on top of everyone else’s in a forty-storey tower.
Those who got on the ladder early watched their wealth inflate magically as prices rose.
Those who did not now live in boxes, sometimes no bigger than a prison cell, and tell themselves it is ‘minimalism’.
On screen – contrast
Split screen again.
Left: a North Korean woman carefully dusting the framed portraits of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il above her sofa – a mandatory daily ritual in many homes, according to defectors, where damage to the leader’s image can bring serious punishment. (hrnk.org)
Right: a young woman in a Seoul goshiwon hanging a BTS poster over her bed, covering a crack in the wall.
The two images rhyme – two sets of faces watching over two cramped lives, for completely different reasons.
7.4 Work: Official Jobs And Real Jobs
On screen – North: the job you pretend to do
We hear factory sirens.
Black-and-white footage: Kim Il Sung visiting a steel plant in the 1950s; lines of workers applauding. Then colour footage from the 1980s: the same choreography, different machines.
On paper, North Korea still promises full employment. Everyone has a work unit, a factory, a farm, or an office to belong to.
But defector interviews tell another story: wages from official jobs are often worth almost nothing – sometimes the equivalent of a few dollars a month – while food rations, once the backbone of the system, were sharply reduced during the 1990s famine and never fully recovered. (libertyinnorthkorea.org)
So people improvise.
We see covert video of a jangmadang street market: muddy ground, makeshift stalls selling Chinese clothes, home-made noodles, corn, cigarettes, pirated DVDs. Women call out to customers and count stacks of worn banknotes.
Analysts now say these markets are the heart of the unofficial economy – ordinary people quietly privatising their lives in order to survive. (libertyinnorthkorea.org)
Voice-over
The ideology said that work would set everyone free – together, as one collective.
But the factories could no longer pay.
So women became smugglers, traders, entrepreneurs.
Men still had to report to their official jobs every morning, even if there was nothing to do.
In the statistics, they were all model workers in a socialist paradise.
In reality, the economy was being rebuilt in the shadows – by people the system pretended not to see.
We show a North Korean woman who fled to the South, describing how she would “check in” at a state workplace to avoid punishment, then run to the market for the rest of the day, selling vegetables or homemade liquor. (libertyinnorthkorea.org)
Overlayed are diagrams from UN reports on mass mobilisation campaigns: students and factory workers sent to construction sites or farms without pay for weeks at a time, labour framed as patriotic duty. (United Nations Human Rights Office)
On screen – South: the job that never ends
Hard cut: a glossy Korean corporate recruitment video – drone shots of a glass office building, young employees in ID lanyards smiling at whiteboards.
Then we see the same workers much later that night, hunched at desks under fluorescent lights. It is 11:30 p.m. Another night of ya-geun – paid overtime – and unpaid “team spirit”.
Seoul time-lapse: office windows slowly going dark, one by one, but never all at once.
In the 2010s, South Korea moved to cap the work week at 52 hours – 40 hours plus 12 hours of overtime – after being shamed repeatedly for having some of the longest working hours in the OECD. (PMC)
But studies show that many workers, especially in small firms and the self-employed, still exceed this. One paper notes that about one in six Korean workers put in more than 55 hours a week – more than twice the OECD average. (archives.kdischool.ac.kr)
Recently, debates have raged about whether to loosen the cap again for “flexibility”, while others argue for even shorter hours to tackle the country’s collapsing birth rate. Politicians talk earnestly about “work–life balance”; tabloid stories talk about cutting Fridays in half so people have more time to have children. (World Economic Forum)
Voice-over
In the South, the problem is not a lack of work.
It is that there is too much of it.
Work became an identity – the way you prove you are a good son, a good father, a good citizen.
Governments tried to limit it to fifty-two hours a week.
But fifty-two hours is still more than anyone in Western Europe works.
And even that number exists mainly on paper.
On screen – contrast
We split the screen again.
Left: North Korean women at the jangmadang stuffing cash into aprons, quickly packing up when a local official appears.
Right: South Korean office workers streaming into a convenience store at midnight to buy instant noodles and canned coffee, before going back upstairs.
The caption reads:
‘In the North, people pretend to work and really trade.
In the South, they really work… and pretend it is a choice.’
7.5 Time At Home
On screen – North
Evening.
A North Korean family in a small apartment sit on the floor around a low table. They eat rice and kimchi by the light of a single bulb. Then the power goes out.
The mother reaches for a battery lamp. On the wall behind them, the faces of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il float eerily in the dark.
A former resident describes how power cuts dictate the rhythm of life outside Pyongyang – people go to bed early in winter, or burn wood they cannot spare. (libertyinnorthkorea.org)
Most do not own televisions that receive anything but state channels. Those who secretly watch smuggled USB sticks full of South Korean dramas do so late at night, with the volume turned almost to zero. If the inminban leader knocks on the door, the files must disappear instantly. (United Nations Docs)
Voice-over
In the North, time at home is supposed to be safe.
It is where you are surrounded by family, and by the leader.
But after the famine, the home also became a factory.
People stitched clothes, made noodles, brewed illegal alcohol – anything they could turn into money at the market in the morning.
The state wanted people to be resting, dreaming of the revolution.
Instead, they were quietly inventing capitalism in their kitchens.
On screen – South
A very different apartment.
A young woman in Seoul unlocks her goshiwon door and squeezes in sideways. She drops her bag on the bed; there is nowhere else to put it. The walls are paper-thin – we can hear someone coughing in the next room, and the muffled sound of a drama through earbuds.
She props her phone against a cup noodle, opens a language-learning app, and starts to study.
Later, we see a young man in a newly built apartment tower – larger, modern, tastefully decorated – sitting alone at a kitchen island, scrolling through property listings. The screen shows how much his home is worth now, compared to when his parents bought it twenty years ago. It looks less like a place to live and more like a stock portfolio. (LGiU)
Voice-over
For many young South Koreans, the home is no longer a place you build a life in.
It is a temporary checkpoint – a charging station between shifts.
They eat convenience-store food alone, in rooms the size of a single mattress, and dream of an apartment with a view.
But that apartment is now an asset class.
And someone else already owns it.
7.6 Two Lives, Same Day
The chapter ends with a carefully constructed day-in-the-life cross-cut.
On screen – 6:00 a.m.
Left: a North Korean woman wakes up on a floor mattress, folds her blanket, and immediately checks the portraits on the wall for dust.
Right: a Seoul delivery rider wakes up in his goshiwon, checks his phone for new orders, and scrolls past a text about overdue rent.
Voice-over
On one side of the border, the first thing you see in the morning is the leader’s face.
On the other, it is a notification.
On screen – 12:30 p.m.
Left: the woman in the North slips away from her nominal workplace to trade at the market – selling homemade tofu, bargaining over a handful of rice.
Right: the rider weaves through traffic delivering coffee to office towers whose names he will never work in.
On screen – 8:00 p.m.
Left: the market woman counts her takings by candlelight. Tomorrow she will buy Chinese flour, and maybe, if she is lucky, a USB stick with new dramas.
Right: the delivery rider leaves his bike in a dark alley and climbs five flights of stairs to his goshiwon. He opens a video where someone else gives a tour of an even smaller room in Seoul, calling it ‘cozy’ and ‘minimalist’. (Korea Herald)
Voice-over
Both of them are exhausted.
Both are trapped in systems that tell them they are lucky.
One is told she lives in a socialist workers’ paradise.
The other is told he lives in one of the richest democracies in the world.
But when they finally lie down in their narrow beds, they are haunted by the same question.
If this is success, why does it feel like there is no room left to breathe?
The screen slowly fades to black, leaving only two rectangles of light:
One is the pale glow of a state-supplied bulb in a North Korean apartment.
The other is the blue glow of a smartphone in a South Korean goshiwon.
They are exactly the same size.
Chapter 8 – Control, Punishment, Stress
It begins with a bell.
Not a church bell, but a metal pipe being struck in a courtyard in Pyongyang at 5:30 a.m.
On screen: a grainy defector’s drawing of a North Korean apartment block courtyard. Women in quilted coats sweep the snow with rough brooms. A woman with a notebook – the inminbanjang, the head of the people’s unit – ticks names off a list. We dissolve into black-and-white documentary footage of North Korean housewives sweeping pavements in the 1970s, then to more recent clandestine video of people cleaning streets by hand.
Voice-over:
‘In North Korea, the day begins with a roll call. Not at work. At home. Because before you belong to a factory, or an office, or even a family – you belong to the state.’
We cut to a simple diagram.
On screen: a stylised apartment block. Each stairwell is lit up as a labelled cell: inminban – literally, people’s unit. Text appears briefly: 20–40 households, one middle-aged woman in charge, responsible for surveillance, cleaning and mobilising unpaid labour.(Wikipedia)
Voice-over:
‘Every North Korean is inserted into a mesh of surveillance called the inminban – neighbourhood units copied from Japanese wartime control systems. Almost nobody is allowed to live outside them. Each one is run by a woman who is officially elected, but in reality is appointed by the Party. She is paid in extra rations to watch. And to listen.’
On screen: text from a human-rights report scrolls slowly as if it were a computer terminal, describing how inminban heads carry out surprise night checks to see who is home, who is visiting, what radio is playing.(Wikipedia)
We see re-enacted footage: shaky handheld camera inside a small flat. A knock at the door. The light comes on. A woman in a plain coat steps in, looks around, touches the picture of Kim Il Sung on the wall to check that it is spotless.
Voice-over, dryly:
‘If there is dust on the leader’s portrait, it is not merely bad housekeeping. It is a political problem.’
The image freezes on the portrait and turns monochrome. Then the camera pulls back – and suddenly we are in a brightly lit Seoul apartment.
On screen: a young South Korean woman in business clothes rushes to the door, late at night. There is no inminban head. Just the glow of her phone, vibrating with work messages and a family group chat. The clock on the wall says 11:48 p.m.
Voice-over:
‘In South Korea, no one comes to your home to check your obedience. They do not need to. Because you carry the inspector in your pocket. And you check yourself.’
The music shifts into a slow, slightly menacing synth loop.
8.1 – Fear as infrastructure
On screen: satellite imagery of a mountain valley in North Korea. Overlays highlight a fenced area, watchtowers, quarry pits. Label: Kwanliso – political prison camp.
Voice-over:
‘Beneath the polite language of neighbourhood units and people’s committees, there is something else. A shadow system. It is not shown on any official map. But it is there, carved into the mountains.’
We intercut:
- Aerial satellite views of Camp 14 and Camp 16 from rights-group reports; fences, guard towers, barracks blocks marked out in red.(Amnesty International)
- A former guard’s testimony re-enacted in close-up, his face in shadow, describing women forced to ‘service’ visiting officials and then being taken away and never seen again. (Amnesty International UK)
- A scrolling PDF page from Amnesty International about forced labour, starvation rations and executions in North Korean political prison camps.(Amnesty International)
Voice-over:
‘The North Korean state denies these places exist. But satellite photos and the stories of guards and prisoners say otherwise. They describe what are called kwanliso – political prison camps – where tens of thousands of people, including children, are held for crimes that range from trying to cross a border… to owning a Bible… or watching a South Korean drama.’
On screen: the estimate from a recent Korean think-tank report appears in stark white type over a dark satellite image – 53,000 to 65,000 prisoners across four main camps – and then is crossed out with a red line, replaced by a larger, earlier estimate of up to 120,000.(The Sun)
Voice-over:
‘Recently, the estimated number of prisoners has fallen. But not because the system has become kinder. One of the largest camps is believed to have been closed – and its prisoners worked to death, transferred, or simply killed.’
The soundtrack cuts out, leaving only ambient wind.
On screen: we fade to a woman in London, talking to a journalist. Subtitles identify her as a North Korean defector who escaped 25 years ago. She describes how her sister, deported back from China in 2023, simply disappeared into the prison system.(The Sun)
Her voice breaks. She says she does not even know which camp her sister is in – only that she is probably hungry and being beaten.
Voice-over, over her tears:
‘This is called enforced disappearance. Officials do not have to prove that you are guilty. They only have to make you vanish. It is cheaper than a trial. And it sends a message to everyone else: that the state is everywhere, and it forgets nothing.’
We cut back to the inminban diagram, now superimposed on a larger diagram of North Korea’s security apparatus: Ministry of State Security, Ministry of People’s Security, party committees. Thin lines connect a single apartment staircase to remote mountain valleys.
Voice-over:
‘Fear is not an emotion here. It is a piece of infrastructure. Like a power line. Or a road.’
8.2 – A poster and a coma
The music suddenly changes – to bright, slightly tacky tourist-video music.
On screen: 2015 promotional video for a Western tour company. Young travellers walk through Pyongyang, smiling nervously as guides in neat uniforms shepherd them. We see the lobby of the Yanggakdo International Hotel, its revolving door, its casino.
Voice-over:
‘In the mid-2010s, North Korea opened a small door to the world – for tourists, and for foreign currency. The regime believed it could control this too. They were wrong.’
We cut to North Korean state TV footage.
On screen: Otto Warmbier, in handcuffs, standing in front of a line of microphones at a press conference in Pyongyang in 2016. He weeps and reads out a confession, claiming he tried to take a propaganda poster for a church in Ohio.(Wikipedia)
Voice-over:
‘This is Otto Warmbier, a 21-year-old American student. In January 2016 he was arrested at the airport as he tried to leave the country. Officials accused him of taking down a propaganda poster from the hotel wall. For this, he was charged with subversion, paraded in a show trial, and sentenced to 15 years of hard labour.’(Wikipedia)
On screen: KCNA video of his one-hour trial. Judges in black robes. A shot of grainy CCTV, apparently showing someone in a hotel corridor removing a poster in the middle of the night.(Wikipedia)
Voice-over:
‘No one knows exactly what happened to him after the cameras were switched off. Seventeen months later, he was returned to the United States in a coma. Doctors said his brain had been without oxygen for a long time. A court in Washington would later call what happened to him torture, and order North Korea to pay his parents half a billion dollars.’(Wikipedia)
On screen: CCTV of Warmbier arriving at Cincinnati airport on a stretcher in June 2017. Then, black. Then, a family photograph of him as a child, smiling in a football shirt.
The music drops away.
Voice-over, very flat:
‘A poster on a wall in a hotel in Pyongyang had turned into a death sentence. Tour operators rewrote their brochures. Governments issued new travel warnings. But for the North Korean state, it was just another example – a foreign body to be crushed, to remind everyone that in this system, even a tourist can be an enemy.’
We cut to a North Korean TV anchor, reading an angry statement that Warmbier was the real criminal, and that the country is the victim of a smear campaign.(Wikipedia)
Voice-over:
‘The signal was simple. There are no accidents here. Everything is political. Even a souvenir.’
The image freezes on the anchor’s face, then dissolves into a very different scene.
8.3 – Exam hell
On screen: drone footage of Seoul at night. Rivers of white headlights on elevated highways. Neon crosses of churches. The camera glides toward a district like Gangnam or Daechi-dong – an entire neighbourhood of cram schools, lit up like an educational Las Vegas.
Voice-over:
‘On the other side of the border, there are also camps. But they are not in the mountains. They are in the middle of the city. And people pay to send their children there.’
We zoom into one building.
On screen: a narrow corridor of a hagwon – a private cram school. The walls are covered in motivational posters and university logos. Through a glass door we see rows of middle-schoolers and high-schoolers, heads bent over test papers, a teacher pacing the aisle.
Voice-over:
‘This is a hagwon. There are tens of thousands of them. They specialise in one thing: preparing children for the Suneung – the national university entrance exam that will decide where they can study, what job they can get… and often, whom they can marry.’
We cut to archive TV footage from the 1990s.
On screen: a Korean news report about Suneung day. Planes are grounded, construction sites halted, police escort late students on motorbikes through traffic. Loudspeakers tell people to be quiet. Parents pray outside school gates, some on their knees.
Voice-over:
‘On exam day, the state asks everyone to be considerate. Flights are delayed so they do not distract the children. Traders keep quiet in the markets. Sirens are banned. It is a national emergency – but not because of a war. Because of a maths paper.’(Wikipedia)
We move into a contemporary interview.
On screen: a South Korean father in his 40s, filmed at his kitchen table, describes his own school days as exam hell. He recalls the slogan that many students still repeat: ‘Sleep four hours and pass. Sleep five hours and fail.’(Wikipedia)
Intercut with:
- A teenage girl stepping out of a hagwon at 11:30 p.m., rubbing her eyes.
- A timetable pinned on a bedroom wall: school, then hagwon, then self-study, then sleep from 2 a.m. to 6 a.m.
Voice-over:
‘Unlike North Korea, there are no guards, no fences, no barbed wire. The door is literally open. But the effect is strangely similar. Your time is no longer your own.’
The screen splits.
On the left: footage of North Korean prisoners marching in line to a labour site, shoulders hunched under loads of rocks.(Amnesty International)
On the right: Seoul teenagers in school uniforms trudging into late-night hagwons, carrying backpacks and textbooks.
Voice-over:
‘In one system, the state extracts labour with guns and dogs. In the other, the market extracts time with dreams and anxiety.’
8.4 – Suicide statistics
The music shifts again – thin, eerie strings and a distant ticking.
On screen: the words ‘Suicide in South Korea’ appear over an aerial shot of an apartment tower at dawn. Then we see a series of graphs: South Korea at the top of the OECD suicide-rate chart; lines for age groups 10–19, 20–29, 30–39 ascending.(Wikipedia)
Voice-over:
‘By the 2020s, South Korea had become one of the richest countries in the world. It also had something else: the highest suicide rate in the club of rich nations. For South Koreans between the ages of ten and thirty-nine, suicide is now the leading cause of death. In their twenties, more than half of all deaths are self-inflicted.’(Wikipedia)
We see news footage:
- A BBC or KBS report about elderly Koreans in rural areas living alone on tiny pensions, many talking openly about wanting to die because they feel like a burden to their children.(Wikipedia)
- A blurred shot of police tape around the base of a tower block, subtitles explaining that three students from elite schools in a wealthy Seoul district jumped to their deaths within five days.(Wikipedia)
Voice-over:
‘For the elderly, the cause is often poverty and loneliness – the collapsing of a Confucian promise that children will care for their parents. For the young, it is different. They live in some of the most highly ranked education systems in the world. Yet surveys say nearly half of high-school students in Seoul are depressed, many with suicidal thoughts. Because most of their grades are given on a curve, and there is only room for a few at the top.’(Wikipedia)
On screen: a montage of South Korean public-service adverts. One shows a celebrity urging viewers to seek help for depression. Another shows animated characters talking about bullying. A third advertises a government hotline.
Voice-over:
‘The state is not blind to this. It funds hotlines, therapy campaigns, and even digital detox camps for teenagers who cannot stop scrolling. But these are small patches on a much larger system of competition that the country believes it cannot afford to dismantle.’(Wikipedia)
We cut to new footage from a 2025 report.
On screen: a Washington Post segment on cram schools for kindergartners. Tiny children, barely able to write, sit at desks learning English phonics and practising how to sit still for an hour to prepare for future exams. Parents outside talk about paying over 1,400 dollars a month and feeling like bad parents if they do less.(The Washington Post)
Voice-over:
‘Now the competition has moved even earlier. Nearly half of children under six receive private education, to prepare them for an exam they will not sit for more than a decade. Some hagwons run entrance tests for their own first-grade classes. There is even a black market in leaked questions. The country has discovered something strange: that success can be as dangerous, and as exhausting, as failure.’(The Washington Post)
The screen fades to black.
8.5 – Silent labour and invisible punishments
Now we return to the North.
On screen: aerial footage of a collective farm. Workers in dark clothes bend over rice paddies. In the foreground, a group of women stand in a small cluster while a man in a uniform shouts at them.
Voice-over:
‘In North Korea, suicide is harder to measure. There are no reliable statistics. Defectors speak of people who disappear, or quietly hang themselves in sheds when food runs out. But the regime does not publish numbers. Instead, its preferred language is that of discipline.’
We see pages from a leaked internal manual, talking about how local leaders must ‘struggle’ against ‘ideological weakness’ and ‘defeatist tendencies’.
Voice-over:
‘What we do know is that every level of life is governed by overlapping systems of control. The songbun caste status decides your prospects. The inminban monitors your behaviour. The workplace Party cell demands self-criticism sessions – where you stand up and accuse yourself before your colleagues. And above everything, there is the threat of being labelled hostile, and sent away.’(Wikipedia)
On screen we cut to animated diagrams of the so-called ‘three-generation’ rule: one person marked as a dissident, then a spreading red circle around their parents, spouse, children, sometimes even grandchildren – all labelled for ‘guilt by association’ and potential imprisonment.(Amnesty International)
Voice-over:
‘In the 21st century, North Korea still uses a medieval idea: that guilt can be inherited. If one person is judged disloyal, their family may also be punished – for three generations. It is less a justice system than a method of pruning the family tree.’
We move to a classroom.
On screen: North Korean schoolchildren in uniform, reciting slogans in unison, clapping rhythmically. DVDs smuggled out of the country show teachers leading chants about loyalty to the Marshal and hatred of American imperialists.
Then, cut.
On screen: a South Korean classroom, where children sing a cheerful song about studying hard, with a cartoon mascot for a stationery brand bouncing on the screen. A TV advert for exam prep books follows.
Voice-over:
‘Both systems begin work early. In the North, children learn that their bodies belong to the revolution, and that one careless comment can doom their grandparents. In the South, children learn that their value is a number on a report card – and that one bad exam can doom their future.’
We intercut:
- A North Korean mass-games performance, where tens of thousands of students flip coloured cards to create perfectly synchronised mosaics.(Amnesty International)
- A South Korean school sports day, sponsored by a snack company; banners for cram schools flutter above the running track.
Voice-over:
‘Both produce extraordinary displays of coordination. One for ideology. The other for the market.’
8.6 – Two kinds of breakdown
The music grows more insistent, then drops to a low drone.
On screen: a satellite image of a North Korean prison camp. The camera zooms closer until the pixels begin to break apart.
Voice-over:
‘In North Korea, when the system fails, the result is often public. A body in the yard after an execution. A family’s house suddenly empty. A village that quietly knows that someone they knew has gone uphill – to the camps.’
We then see defector interviews:
- A former prisoner describing how people were forced to watch hangings or shootings as a warning.(Amnesty International)
- A former guard admitting that he saw detainees digging their own graves.(Amnesty International UK)
Voice-over:
‘Fear here is theatrical. It must be seen. It must be heard. It must be remembered.’
The screen cuts to Seoul again.
On screen: a montage of small, ordinary interiors – a goshiwon micro-room with a single bed and a desk; a middle-aged man’s apartment with invoices and debt notices piled on the table; a schoolgirl’s bedroom with revision notes covering the walls.
Voice-over:
‘In South Korea, breakdown usually happens in private. In a rented room the size of a parking space. On a bridge. In a bathroom at school. There is no show trial. No self-criticism session. Just a short news item the next day, and more statistics on a chart.’
We see a brief shot of a candlelight vigil for a young celebrity who took their own life – fans crying, holding signs against cyberbullying and mental-health stigma.
Voice-over:
‘The country holds vigils for idols who cannot bear the pressure. But the system they lived in continues unchanged – because everyone is afraid that if they stop running, the miracle will end.’
8.7 – The cost of being normal
We return to the DMZ, but not the famous blue conference huts.
On screen: a misty view of the barbed wire fence from the South Korean side. Morning joggers run along a riverside path nearby, wearing wireless earbuds.
Voice-over:
‘Seen from this quiet path, both systems look like extremes. One is a totalitarian nightmare. The other is a hyper-competitive democracy. But to the people who built them, they were simply rational responses to fear.’
The images cross-cut rapidly:
- Kim Il Sung addressing a crowd in the 1950s, promising that only total unity and vigilance can protect the nation from American aggression.
- Park Chung-hee and later South Korean leaders promising that only sacrifice and hard work can lift the country from poverty and protect it from communism.(Wikipedia)
Voice-over:
‘North Korea built a system where the only way to survive is to obey. South Korea built a system where the only way to survive is to compete. Both insisted that this was the price of security. And both produced new kinds of insecurity that no one had predicted: invisible prisons of anxiety, and visible prisons of concrete and barbed wire.’
On screen: a final split screen.
Left side:
- A North Korean guard tower at dusk, a soldier silhouetted against the sky.
Right side:
- A Seoul office tower at midnight, a lone window still lit, a worker hunched over a computer.
Voice-over, very quietly:
‘In one Korea, if you stop working, you risk being sent to a camp. In the other, no one will send you anywhere. You will simply fall off the ladder. You will stop being counted. Both systems are built on a promise: that if you endure the punishment, you will be safe. But as the decades pass, more and more people are discovering that this promise… was never really true.’
The chapter closes on an almost still shot:
On screen: a South Korean student in a PC-bang, asleep over a keyboard; and, cross-faded over the same position, a North Korean prisoner asleep on a bunk in a concrete cell.
The music holds on a single, unresolved note.
Chapter 9 – The DMZ: War, Tourism, Theatre
Opening – A Strip Of Land That Is Not At Peace
[VISUAL]
Aerial shot from a helicopter: the Korean Peninsula seen from high above, soft cloud cover, orchestral strings from a 1960s documentary. The camera slowly tilts down. The land tightens into a narrow waist: a faint horizontal scar, slicing sea to sea.
Cut closer: barbed wire coils, guard towers, a rusted sign: Military Demarcation Line. Snow collected in the angles of concrete tank traps. Birds lifting off from silent, empty fields.
[AUDIO – CURTIS-STYLE VOICE]
This is the Korean Demilitarized Zone.
It was created in 1953 as a ceasefire line at the end of a war that never officially ended. A strip of land, roughly four kilometres wide and about two hundred and fifty kilometres long, that runs like a surgical incision across the peninsula. (encyclopedai.stavros.io)
It is supposed to be demilitarized. In reality, it is one of the most heavily fortified places on earth – saturated with landmines, artillery, and men with binoculars, staring at each other across the void. (The Korea Times)
[VISUAL]
Hard cut to 1960s black-and-white: US and South Korean soldiers building fences, laying razor wire, hammering signs into the earth that say things like No entry beyond this point. On the other side of the fence, distant silhouettes of North Korean watchtowers.
Then colour footage from the 1980s: South Korean conscripts jogging along a high fence, their boots pounding in unison, rifles bouncing on their backs. A sign in English and Korean: Caution! Mines!
Cut again – drone shot today: the same fence line, but now the barbed wire is interrupted by a gleaming cable car pylon, a modern station with glass walls, and a parking lot full of tour buses. (Tripadvisor)
[AUDIO – CURTIS-STYLE VOICE]
But something strange has happened to this front line of the Cold War.
Over time, it has become three things at once: a battlefield that is always on the verge of restarting, a sanctuary for animals, and a tourist attraction. (Wikipedia)
The Frozen War
[VISUAL]
Colour stills of the 1953 armistice signing at Panmunjom: delegates from the UN Command and North Korea/China sitting at tables, pens poised over thick paper.
Overlay a simple animated map: arrows surging south in 1950, then north, then south again, then stiffening into a jagged horizontal line. The arrows drain away, leaving a thick, glowing stripe labelled DMZ.
[AUDIO – CURTIS-STYLE VOICE]
When the fighting stopped in 1953, the armies signed an armistice.
Not a peace treaty. Just an agreement to stop shooting. (Wikipedia)
They drew a line roughly where the front happened to be that week – and agreed to pull their forces back two kilometres each. The space in between would be a buffer. A demilitarized zone. (encyclopedai.stavros.io)
[VISUAL]
Archival colour film: US soldiers dismantling foxholes and rolling up barbed wire inside the future DMZ, while, further back, tanks rumble into new positions. Cut to a North Korean newsreel from the same decade: soldiers on the northern side celebrating, artillery parading through Pyongyang, captions praising the great victory over the imperialists.
Then on screen, text appears in simple white letters over a slow pan of mist over forested hills inside the DMZ:
There are now believed to be around a million landmines buried in and around the DMZ.
(A conservative paraphrase of multiple estimates.) (Wikipedia)
[AUDIO – CURTIS-STYLE VOICE]
On paper, the zone itself is supposed to be empty of troops and weapons. In reality, both sides have layered their defences all around it – minefields, artillery, bunkers. Thirty thousand US troops. Hundreds of thousands of South Korean and North Korean soldiers. All facing each other through binoculars, waiting for a war that everyone says they do not want. (Wikipedia)
[VISUAL]
Slow-motion montage:
- A South Korean soldier’s eye behind a binocular viewfinder.
- A North Korean soldier’s eye behind a similar pair of binoculars.
- Their mirrored silhouettes, filmed from behind, looking at each other across the Joint Security Area.
Joint Security Area – A Stage Set
[VISUAL]
Wide shot of the Joint Security Area at Panmunjom: the row of small blue conference huts straddling the line, the concrete curb marking the border itself, North Korean soldiers in dark uniforms on one side, South Korean troops in sunglasses and helmets on the other, standing in stiff, theatrical poses. (The Korea Times)
A tourist group shuffles into frame with cameras and baseball caps, led by a South Korean officer giving instructions.
[AUDIO – CURTIS-STYLE VOICE]
This is the Joint Security Area – the only place where North and South Korean soldiers stand face to face, a few metres apart.
It was designed as a neutral space for negotiations. Over time, it has turned into something else: a theatre. (Wikipedia)
[VISUAL]
Re-enacted footage from a South Korean tourism video: stabilised camera gliding past the blue huts, upbeat synth music, captions pointing out Meeting Room, Military Demarcation Line, North Korean side.
Cut sharply to a North Korean state TV segment: a female announcer with meticulous hair, gesturing toward the same huts from the opposite angle, praising the vigilance of the DPRK soldiers who guard the frontline of the revolution.
Tourists on both sides take selfies with the huts in the background.
[AUDIO – CURTIS-STYLE VOICE]
Every day, tour buses arrive from Seoul, full of visitors who have signed waivers saying they understand that they are travelling to an active war zone. (Tripadvisor)
They are told not to point, not to wave, not to make sudden movements – in case the soldiers on the other side misunderstand and start shooting.
Peace Theatre – The 2018 Summit
[VISUAL]
We cut to 27 April 2018. Television footage from around the world.
A long, static shot of the concrete curb in the middle of Panmunjom. On one side, South Korean president Moon Jae-in, in a dark suit, waiting. On the other, Kim Jong Un, in his black Mao-style jacket, stepping forward with a smile that looks both rehearsed and nervous.
Slow zoom as they meet, shake hands exactly on the line. Then – in a moment that becomes global news – Kim suddenly invites Moon to step briefly into the North, and then they cross together into the South. (The Korea Times)
[AUDIO – NATURAL SOUND]
The sound of hundreds of camera shutters. A low roar from the press pack.
[AUDIO – CURTIS-STYLE VOICE]
In 2018, something happened that seemed to break the spell.
The leaders of North and South Korea met here, at Panmunjom. They crossed the line together, planted a tree, and declared that a new era of peace had begun. (The Korea Times)
[VISUAL]
Footage of Moon and Kim sitting at a small table, signing the Panmunjom Declaration as smiling aides look on. Later, the two leaders wave together from an open balcony, backed by enormous flags, as an audience in the South applauds and waves small paper Korean Peninsula flags in sky-blue and white.
[AUDIO – CURTIS-STYLE VOICE]
Television news called it historic.
Commentators said that the Korean War might finally, formally, legally, be brought to an end. Capital flowed into companies that might benefit from peace. Tour agencies began to advertise special DMZ packages, offering visitors the chance to see history in the making. (The Korea Times)
[VISUAL]
Graphic of a travel agency website advertising a Panmunjom Peace Tour, early-bird discounts highlighted in pastel colours.
Then: a cut away to Pyongyang state television showing the summit: carefully edited footage of Kim and Moon smiling, accompanied by triumphal music. The announcer’s voice is full of emotion.
Collapse Of The Dream – The Liaison Office
[VISUAL]
Exterior shot of the inter-Korean liaison office at Kaesong, just north of the DMZ. A modern, glass-fronted building, standing in a quiet industrial park that was supposed to symbolise economic cooperation between the two Koreas.
[AUDIO – CURTIS-STYLE VOICE]
But the new era did not last.
Within two years, the negotiations stalled. Talks with the United States broke down. The old patterns of mistrust and humiliation returned.
[VISUAL]
Security camera footage from June 2020: the Kaesong liaison building in the middle distance. There is a flash inside the structure, then a huge explosion. Glass, concrete and smoke erupt into the air. The building collapses in a cloud of dust.
[AUDIO – NEWS CLIPS]
Rapid montage of English and Korean TV anchors:
North Korea has blown up the joint liaison office in Kaesong…
The symbol of rapprochement between North and South has been reduced to rubble…
[AUDIO – CURTIS-STYLE VOICE]
North Korea demolished the liaison office that had been set up to manage daily relations between the two Koreas.
The message was simple: the performance was over. The stage could be destroyed. The war, officially, still continued.
[VISUAL]
We replay the explosion in slow motion, from a different angle. Then freeze on the cloud of dust hanging over empty land where the building stood.
Smash cut back to tourists at Panmunjom that same year, lined up for photos, the guide pointing out the border curb as if nothing has changed.
Tourist Kitsch On The Front Line
[VISUAL]
Bright summer day at Imjingak Peace Park, on the southern edge of the DMZ. Children run past tanks and artillery pieces displayed as monuments. There are colourful ribbons tied to a barbed-wire fence, messages of hope and unification written on them in felt-tip pen. In the background, a small amusement park: a Ferris wheel turning, a pirate-ship ride swinging, pop music playing over tinny speakers. (Tripadvisor)
[AUDIO – CURTIS-STYLE VOICE]
Just south of the DMZ there is a place called Imjingak.
It was built to comfort refugees who fled from the North and cannot go back. But it has slowly turned into something else: an open-air museum of the war – with rides. (Tripadvisor)
[VISUAL]
A family rides the Ferris wheel. As the cabins rise, the camera looks out over the Imjin River towards the barbed wire and watchtowers of the Civilian Control Line.
A tour bus arrives: DMZ Tour written in large letters on the side. Tourists in matching caps spill out, waving guidebooks and selfie sticks.
On the screen, a quick montage of travel vlog thumbnails tagged DMZ Tour, Most Dangerous Border and Korea War Zone Day Trip from YouTube.
[AUDIO – CURTIS-STYLE VOICE]
There are now dozens of DMZ tours leaving Seoul every day. They advertise the chance to look into North Korea through binoculars, to walk through an old infiltration tunnel dug under the border, and to drink coffee in a cafe that sells DMZ-branded mugs. (Tripadvisor)
[VISUAL]
Inside the Third Infiltration Tunnel, drilled by the North and discovered by the South in the 1970s: tourists in hard hats walk through a damp, low concrete corridor, stopping to pose under a sign that says End Of Tour. (EBSCO)
Cut to a gift shop selling chocolate in camouflage packaging, bottles of DMZ rice wine, and cartoon postcards of soldiers. A rack of T-shirts printed with slogans like End Of Separation and I Visited The DMZ.
[AUDIO – CURTIS-STYLE VOICE]
The front line of the Cold War has become a day trip. You can ride a bike along it. You can buy a snack. You can upload a short video of yourself pointing into the distance, saying that you can feel the tension in the air. (Tripadvisor)
[VISUAL]
South Korean promotional clip: cyclists in matching helmets pedalling along a riverside path near the DMZ, smiling, drone shots sweeping over them. A logo appears for a DMZ Bike Tour. (NK News – North Korea News)
The Loudspeaker Wars
[VISUAL]
We cut to a tall grey metal structure on the southern side of the border: a huge bank of loudspeakers mounted on a steel tower, pointing towards the North. Soldiers in camouflage uniforms check cables and controls.
[AUDIO – CURTIS-STYLE VOICE]
But underneath the tourist kitsch, there is another kind of theatre.
For years, the two Koreas have also fought a war of sound along this border – a strange battle of loudspeakers, songs, and propaganda. (Tripadvisor)
[VISUAL]
South Korean army footage: technicians flipping switches in a control room, then a close-up of enormous speaker cones as they begin to vibrate.
The soundtrack explodes into sugary K-pop: a girl group track pumping across a landscape of pine-covered hills and barbed wire.
[AUDIO – CURTIS-STYLE VOICE]
When relations deteriorate, South Korea sometimes switches on giant loudspeakers at the border. They broadcast news bulletins about corruption in the North, weather reports – and K-pop songs. (Tripadvisor)
[VISUAL]
Graphic map showing lines of sound waves reaching across the DMZ into North Korea.
Cut to North Korean TV: the familiar, stern announcer denounces these broadcasts as a psychological warfare campaign to make soldiers defect.
[AUDIO – CURTIS-STYLE VOICE]
The broadcasts are so loud that, in some places, they are heard up to twenty kilometres inside North Korea. The North responds with its own loudspeakers – praising the leader, denouncing the puppets in Seoul, and threatening destruction. (Tripadvisor)
[VISUAL]
Late-evening footage of the DMZ: loudspeakers lit by floodlights, fog drifting between them, disembodied voices echoing across empty fields.
Balloons Of Trash
[VISUAL]
News footage from 2016: South Korean activists launching large helium balloons across the border, loaded with plastic bags containing leaflets about human rights and USB sticks full of South Korean dramas. Police try to hold them back. (Encyclopedia Britannica)
[AUDIO – CURTIS-STYLE VOICE]
Sometimes, the war of messages floats through the sky instead.
Defector groups in the South send balloons with leaflets attacking the North Korean regime, and USB sticks filled with foreign movies and pop songs. (Encyclopedia Britannica)
[VISUAL]
Cut to 2024 smartphone footage taken in a South Korean town near the border: white balloons drifting overhead, trailing bags of rubbish that splatter on roads, roofs and fields when they fall. South Korean officials in hazmat suits examine the contents: cigarette butts, plastic bottles, paper waste. (Wikipedia)
[AUDIO – CURTIS-STYLE VOICE]
In 2024, North Korea restarted its own balloon campaign – sending hundreds of balloons packed with garbage and what South Korean officials described as filth, drifting on the wind towards the South. (Wikipedia)
[VISUAL]
Montage:
- A South Korean official holds up a torn plastic bag filled with trash.
- A farmer looks at white balloon remnants in his field.
- A nervous mother leads her child indoors as sirens sound.
[AUDIO – NEWS CLIP]
The South Korean government has condemned the launches as a grave provocation, calling them psychological warfare using trash. (Wikipedia)
[AUDIO – CURTIS-STYLE VOICE]
It is a war conducted with sound systems and rubbish – not tanks.
But both sides insist that these strange, theatrical acts are matters of national security.
Nature In The No-Man’s Land
[VISUAL]
The mood shifts. Music changes to something slow and ambient. The screen fills with morning mist over wetlands and forests inside the DMZ. A deer steps out cautiously from behind a tree. Cranes wheel overhead. A camera trap captures a wild boar snuffling through undergrowth. (Wikipedia)
[AUDIO – CURTIS-STYLE VOICE]
Because no one has been allowed to live in the DMZ for seventy years, something else has happened here.
The minefields and fences, designed to kill people, have accidentally protected animals. (Wikipedia)
[VISUAL]
Biologists in bright vests and helmets move carefully along marked paths, carrying clipboards and binoculars. Camera traps are strapped to trees.
Maps and graphics overlay: the DMZ highlighted in green as a possible sanctuary for rare species, including red-crowned cranes and, some scientists believe, possibly endangered big cats. (Wikipedia)
[AUDIO – CURTIS-STYLE VOICE]
Environmentalists now talk about turning the DMZ into a peace park – a giant nature reserve stretching across the peninsula.
But for that to happen, the war that built it would have to end. And no one seems able to end it. (Wikipedia)
[VISUAL]
We cross-cut between two images:
- A deer picking its way past a rusty, half-buried anti-tank obstacle.
- A South Korean child at Imjingak, posing for a photo in front of an old tank painted in camouflage.
Two Performances, One Border
[VISUAL]
Split screen.
On the left: North Korean soldiers goose-stepping on a parade ground in Pyongyang, a banner behind them declaring the eternal strength of the Korean People’s Army. On the right: a South Korean pop concert near the DMZ, with an idol group performing on stage, LEDs flashing, dancers in neon outfits.
The camera slowly zooms out until the two halves of the frame shrink into rectangles floating over a satellite image of the DMZ.
[AUDIO – CURTIS-STYLE VOICE]
The DMZ shows something unsettling about the modern world.
On one level, it is a relic of the Cold War – a frozen battlefield, guarded by soldiers with rifles and artillery.
On another, it is a tourist attraction, a nature reserve, and a theatre where both Koreas act out their versions of history in front of cameras and tourists. (Wikipedia)
[VISUAL]
Quick-fire montage:
- Tourists snapping photos of North Korean guards at Panmunjom.
- A North Korean guard surreptitiously glancing at the tourists’ cameras.
- Loudspeakers blasting K-pop across a silent forest.
- Balloons of trash drifting in the sky.
- Cranes flying over the same minefields at dawn.
[AUDIO – CURTIS-STYLE VOICE]
Both sides say they are defending their people from a terrible enemy on the other side of the line.
But what the DMZ really reveals is something else – that, over time, war itself can become a kind of performance. A spectacle for television, for tourists, and for the leaders who need it to justify their power.
[VISUAL]
Final shot of the chapter: the famous night-time satellite image of the Korean Peninsula. The DMZ itself is invisible – just a seam between the dark land of the North and the blazing lights of the South. (cari cakes)
As the music fades, the camera pushes slowly into the black strip between light and darkness.
[AUDIO – CURTIS-STYLE VOICE, QUIET]
It is just a line on a map.
But everything in this film – the famine and the neon, the plastic surgery and the prison camps, the smartphones and the secret police – has grown out of what that line did to history.
On this narrow strip of land, the two Koreas stare at each other across the void – and act out the war that never ends, for an audience that has forgotten how it began.
Chapter 10 – Two Science-Fictions, One Peninsula
Music: slow, hovering strings over a faint electronic pulse. Something between melancholy and science-fiction opening credits.
On screen: The NASA night photograph of the Korean Peninsula from orbit. The South is a white nebula of light; the North is a void with a tiny ember where Pyongyang sits. (Young Pioneer Tours)
Voice-over
In the twenty-first century, if you look at Korea from space, it seems simple.
One half shines with light.
The other has almost disappeared.
The image freezes. A thick white border appears around it, as if it were a still from an old educational film. A mechanical click: the still is pulled back into a 1950s classroom projector frame. Children’s heads in silhouette watch the peninsula glowing on the wall.
Voice-over
It looks like a story about progress and failure.
About a successful South … and a broken, backward North.
But this is not what actually happened.
Because on this narrow strip of land, something stranger was built.
Two separate futures.
Both of them borrowed from the dreams of the twentieth century.
Both of them spiralled away from reality.
And now, from orbit, they look like two different planets.
That no longer belong on Earth at all.
10.1 – The Future That Turned Into a Museum
Cut to: colour footage of a vast mass-gymnastics display in Pyongyang, the Arirang games. The stadium is an enormous bowl of colour; tens of thousands of people hold coloured cards above their heads, forming a giant portrait of Kim Il Sung that appears to breathe as the cards flip in sync. (Alamy)
Voice-over
In the North, the future was supposed to look like this.
A city-sized machine made of human beings.
Every body moving in perfect formation, to celebrate a man who had defeated history.
On screen: slow motion close-ups of individual faces inside the card section. A teenage girl’s expression flickers between concentration and panic as she tries not to miss her cue; an old man’s hands tremble slightly holding the card above his head; a line of schoolchildren sweat in the afternoon heat.
Voice-over
This was the promise of the twentieth-century revolution.
That politics would leave the messy, chaotic world behind …
…and build a perfectly organised society.
But in Pyongyang, the revolution never ended.
Cut to: black-and-white footage of Kim Il Sung in the 1950s, stepping through ruins, soldiers saluting. Then to later footage: the massive bronze statues at Mansudae, crowds bowing in unison.
Voice-over
Kim Il Sung created a state ideology called Juche.
It said that the Korean people could be completely self-reliant, if they had a leader with almost supernatural insight.
His birth year became Year One of a new calendar.
Time itself was reset around his body.
On screen: propaganda posters of a glowing infant Kim Il Sung in the sky above mountains; a calendar with Juche Year 1, 2, 3 flipping. Then, hard cut to the embalmed body of Kim Il Sung lying in state in the Kumsusan Palace, as visitors shuffle past bowed over.
Voice-over
The leader’s body became a sacred object.
It was embalmed, displayed, visited in silence, like the relic of a saint.
And around it, the party built a system that classified every other body.
Graphic: a vertical chart appears, grim and bureaucratic. At the top: “Core”. In the middle: “Wavering”. At the bottom: “Hostile”. Sub-branches spider out into dozens of categories. (Scribd)
Voice-over
It was called songbun.
A caste system that divided the population into loyal, doubtful and hostile.
Your family background determined where you could live.
What food you could eat.
Whether your children would survive.
On screen: early-morning shots in a provincial North Korean town. Cracked pavements. A woman pulls a wooden cart loaded with coal briquettes. She passes a wall with a giant mural of smiling workers and a slogan praising self-reliance.
Cut to: Pyongyang skyline with new pastel-coloured apartment towers and LED fountains at night. The camera glides along the façade: in one window a brightly lit living room and a flat-screen TV; in the darkness behind the camera, the rest of the country.
Voice-over
From a distance, Pyongyang looks like any other modern city.
New tower blocks. Neon lights.
But the modernity is selective.
Archival: inside a North Korean apartment. A woman dusts the twin portraits of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il carefully with a soft cloth. She straightens them minutely, then steps back to check they are perfectly level.
Voice-over
Political devotion is still the most valuable form of capital.
While outside the capital, the future has stopped.
On screen: washed-out video of rural roads, an ox cart creaking past people on bicycles; children in faded uniforms doing mass drills without equipment in a bare yard. Snowflakes drift through an alley as women break ice to fetch water from a frozen pump.
Voice-over
Electricity comes and goes.
Whole villages go dark at night.
People burn wood, coal, anything they can find, to keep warm. (HRNK)
The Arirang stadium returns. The crowd flips their cards again, and Kim Il Sung’s face reappears, grinning over the field.
Voice-over
In theory, this is the future that communism promised.
In reality, it has become a museum.
A vast, living diorama of how totalitarianism imagined the world would look.
10.2 – The Future That Arrived Too Fast
Smash cut: a BTS stadium concert in Seoul. Tens of thousands of fans hold plastic light sticks; the sea of dots changes colour as a Bluetooth signal sweeps through the crowd. The sticks pulse in synchrony, forming waves of purple light that roll around the stadium. (Amino Apps)
Voice-over
On the other side of the border, there is another crowd.
They are also waving a leader’s face into existence.
But this time, the leader is a boy band.
On screen: close-ups of fans’ faces, crying and smiling, mouths moving in perfect unison as they chant a fanchant. Glitter make-up, DIY slogans on headbands, phones held high.
Voice-over
In the South, the future did arrive.
But it came all at once.
Archival montage: 1960s black-and-white footage of Seoul streets crowded with bicycles; 1970s colour film of workers in headbands assembling televisions; 1988 Olympic opening ceremony with doves and laser lights; 1990s images of glass and steel towers rising along the Han River. (inhabitat.com)
Voice-over
In a few decades, South Korea went from dictatorship to democracy, from famine to a member of the rich countries’ club.
It built a miracle on the Han River.
But the miracle had a price.
Graphic: a thick line graph climbs almost vertically – representing GDP per capita – while, beneath it, a thinner line representing suicide rates rises too. (Financial Times)
Voice-over
Today, South Korea is one of the most connected societies in the world.
Almost everyone has a smartphone.
Almost every home has high-speed internet. (Facebook)
On screen: a Seoul subway carriage in the morning rush hour. Every visible passenger is looking at a phone. The train rocks; the faces remain still, lit by blue-white rectangles.
Voice-over
But it also has one of the highest suicide rates in the rich world.
For young people, suicide is a leading cause of death.
For the elderly, loneliness and poverty make death feel like a financial decision. (Financial Times)
Cut to: news footage of a Seoul city press conference in 2024. Officials unveil a banner: ‘Seoul Without Loneliness’. Behind them, a PowerPoint slide lists hotline numbers, community dining projects, “healing programs”. (Business Insider)
Voice-over
The government has begun spending hundreds of millions of dollars on schemes to fight loneliness.
Helplines. Group dinners.
Therapy boot camps.
They are trying to fix the symptoms.
But not the system that produced them.
On screen: the city at night. A delivery rider hunched over his scooter weaves across an overpass, thirty foam-packed meals strapped to the back. A digital timer on his app counts down. He runs three red lights in a row.
Voice-over
South Korea is a democracy.
Its presidents can be impeached and put on trial.
But the real power is in something nobody voted for.
A network of expectations.
Montage: cram-school classrooms at midnight, students asleep on desks; stock-price tickers outside Samsung headquarters; a plastic-surgery street in Gangnam with glossy before-and-after posters; megachurch congregations singing as LED crosses flash behind them. (Freedom of Thought Report)
Voice-over
You must study harder.
Work longer.
Upgrade your body.
Optimise your feelings.
If you fail, there is nobody to blame.
Except yourself.
This is the future that capitalism promised.
A world of endless possibility.
But in Seoul, possibility feels like an exam that never ends.
10.3 – Two Experiments from the Same Trauma
On screen: grainy black-and-white footage from 1945 – Koreans celebrating liberation from Japanese rule; people tearing down Japanese signs; a crowd outside a government building waving flags. (Dokumen)
Voice-over
Both of these futures began in the same place.
A colony, freed from empire.
A war, frozen in place.
And two superpowers, who carved up the peninsula on a map in Washington in a matter of minutes. (youtube.com)
The 1945 National Geographic map appears again. A hand draws the 38th parallel in pencil. The pencil line shakes slightly, as if the hand is tired.
Voice-over
For decades, Koreans were told that their suffering was caused by the Other Korea.
The North was told that the South was a “puppet state”, run by American imperialists.
The South was told that the North was a deranged rogue, run by a family of madmen. (The Sun)
Split screen: on the left, a North Korean newsreader in Kim Il Sung lapel badge, reading the evening news about “US imperialist plots” in a severe tone. On the right, a 1970s South Korean anticommunist propaganda film in which cartoonish red soldiers swarm across a map.
Voice-over
But if you step back, the two systems start to look less like enemies …
and more like mirror images.
Two different ways of dealing with the same trauma.
On screen: a slow, symmetrical montage. Left side: a North Korean child bows before a portrait of Kim Il Sung; right side: a South Korean child bows before a framed graduation certificate and a wall filled with school medals. The two bodies bend at the same angle, in perfect sync.
Voice-over
In the North, the answer was to freeze history.
Shut the borders.
Turn the leader into God.
In the South, the answer was to outrun history.
Open to the world.
Turn growth into a moral duty.
Both promised protection from chaos.
Both created new forms of madness instead.
10.4 – Information, Fear and Addiction
North Korean side: black-and-white shot of a woman tuning an old radio in a rural home. The dial is physically sealed with red wax at one end so it cannot move past the state frequencies.
Voice-over
In the North, the state is terrified of information.
On screen: a modern government-issued North Korean smartphone, as revealed in the smuggled investigation. A user scrolls through a bland interface. In the background, the phone secretly takes a screenshot. A hidden folder icon flashes faintly. (The Sun)
Voice-over
Today, even smartphones have been redesigned to watch their owners.
The operating system secretly takes screenshots every few minutes.
It scans for forbidden words.
It replaces South Korean slang with regime-approved terms.
And if you watch foreign dramas, you can be sent to a labour camp for years. (The Sun)
South Korean side: teenagers in a government-run digital detox camp walk in a forest, clutching yoga mats. A counsellor tells them to “feel the wind” and “return to analogue life”. They look bored and anxious. (Human Rights Watch)
Voice-over
In the South, the fear is different.
Here, the state worries that people cannot stop watching.
Official surveys now count tens of thousands of young people as at risk of internet and smartphone addiction.
So the same government that built one of the fastest networks on earth now funds camps to help teenagers turn their phones off. (Facebook)
On screen: extreme close-up of thumbs scrolling through an endless feed of short videos; then extreme close-up of a North Korean official’s finger scrolling through the hidden screenshot folder on a confiscated phone.
Voice-over
In both Koreas, technology did not set people free.
In the North, it became a tool for surveillance.
In the South, it became a weapon that people use on themselves.
To distract.
To numb.
To keep going.
10.5 – Two Crowds, One System
Wide shot: the DMZ at Panmunjom on a grey day. The blue conference huts sit on the line. South Korean and North Korean soldiers stare at each other in sunglasses. Tourists mill around on the southern side, taking selfies. (worldnomads.com)
Voice-over
At the border, the two futures come face to face.
Here, the war has never officially ended.
But it can be visited on a package tour.
On screen: South Korean tourists pose, making V-signs with their fingers. A guide jokes about “North Korean spies behind that window”. In the distance, a lone North Korean soldier looks through binoculars, expressionless.
Voice-over
For a moment, the whole peninsula seems like a piece of performance art.
A totalitarian state that behaves like a parody of the Cold War.
A hyper-capitalist democracy that treats the Cold War as an attraction.
Both sides insist that they are completely different.
But when you watch their crowds, something else appears.
Slow cross-fade: Arirang stadium again – the human mosaic forming Kim’s face – dissolves gradually into the BTS concert light-stick ocean forming a purple wave. The two images align so that the faces in the stands almost overlay each other. (Alamy)
Voice-over
In Pyongyang, human beings arrange themselves into a portrait of their leader.
In Seoul, human beings arrange their light sticks into a glowing ocean for their idols.
Both crowds lose themselves.
In something bigger.
In a story that tells them who they are.
On screen: split screen again. Left: a North Korean crowd in tears at Kim Jong Il’s funeral, sobbing theatrically. Right: a South Korean crowd in tears at a K-pop farewell concert, sobbing into merch towels.
Voice-over
One story says it is about revolution.
The other says it is about freedom and choice.
But underneath, they both depend on the same thing.
An invisible system of power.
10.6 – The Invisible System
Montage: archival clips of American strategists drawing lines on maps in the late 1940s; IMF officials in 1997 in meeting rooms; trade negotiators; chaebol boardrooms; Chinese delegation visiting Pyongyang; missile launch footage broadcast on North Korean TV; Seoul stock exchange floor. (youtube.com)
Voice-over
After the Second World War, the superpowers believed they could engineer the world.
They would impose borders, economic plans, alliances.
Korea became a laboratory for their ambitions.
In the North, Soviet and Chinese support helped build a command economy.
In the South, American money and pressure helped build an export machine. (inhabitat.com)
But over time, both projects turned into something new.
Graphic: the map of Korea morphs into a circuit board. The DMZ becomes a glowing line of diodes. On one side, a symbol of a missile; on the other, a symbol of a dollar sign and a smartphone.
Voice-over
In Pyongyang, the state retreated into a bunker of ideology.
It tied its survival to nuclear weapons and a small elite.
In Seoul, power melted into a network of corporations, global markets and digital platforms.
Politicians came and went.
The system stayed.
On screen: a South Korean president in handcuffs being led into court; a North Korean official saluting in front of a missile on a transporter; a scrolling feed of K-pop content and luxury brand adverts on a phone.
Voice-over
Both sides told their citizens that they were free.
Free from imperialism.
Free to consume.
But the real choices – about work, technology, war and money – were made elsewhere.
10.7 – The Strip of Land
Return to the orbit shot. The peninsula hangs in darkness, South blazing, North dim. (Young Pioneer Tours)
Voice-over
Seen from space, the peninsula looks like a simple morality tale.
Light and darkness.
Good and evil.
But if you look more closely, the light starts to flicker.
Zoom into the South. The glowing areas resolve into individual apartment towers. Inside one window: a student alone at a desk, surrounded by textbooks, a can of energy drink and a small pill bottle. Inside another: an old woman eating instant noodles alone in front of a TV shopping channel. Inside another: three young office workers in suits lying exhausted on the floor after a late drinking session. (Business Insider)
Voice-over
Inside the brightness is a different kind of darkness.
Of exhaustion.
Competition.
And a growing feeling that the future has stalled.
Zoom into the North. The blackness resolves into a faint glow over Pyongyang, and then into a single apartment lit by a bare bulb. A family sit around a table. The power goes off suddenly; they shrug, light a candle, and continue eating in the dim orange light. (HRNK)
Voice-over
Inside the darkness is something else too.
A network of informal markets, smuggled USB sticks, whispered stories about the outside world.
Fragments of another future that the state cannot completely control. (The Sun)
On screen: a North Korean defector being interviewed in a bland office in Seoul. They talk about watching a smuggled South Korean drama, and realising that the state had lied about everything. Then cut to a South Korean office worker in the same bland office, talking about wanting to escape to “a simpler life overseas where nobody works until midnight”.
Voice-over
In both Koreas, individuals are beginning to sense that they are trapped inside somebody else’s science-fiction.
10.8 – The End of the Story
Final montage builds slowly
– A North Korean kindergarten class, chanting a song about the Leader with hand motions.
– A South Korean kindergarten class, chanting English phrases about “My dream job” in unison.
– The Arirang card section, forming a huge red sun.
– A Seoul stock-market screen turning red as prices fall.
– Soldiers marching in Pyongyang.
– Idol trainees marching in a K-pop dance practice room.
Images start to cross-fade until they overlay one another, creating ghostly composites.
Voice-over
For seventy years, the world has treated Korea as a divided story.
A tragic civil war.
Two irreconcilable systems.
But when you put the images together, the story changes.
You start to see one global system.
On screen: the pencil line of the 38th parallel, drawn across the map, reappears. It pulses. Then it dissolves into a heartbeat-like waveform that runs across the whole frame.
Voice-over
A system that experiments with human beings.
In one laboratory, it asks:
What happens if we seal a country off, and make ideology into a religion.
In the other, it asks:
What happens if we speed up capitalism, compress hundreds of years of development into a single lifetime, and hand everyone a glowing screen.
Neither experiment has an exit plan.
Return one last time to the paired crowds.
Left: the North Korean stadium. Tens of thousands of arms raise coloured cards to create Kim’s face.
Right: the South Korean stadium. Tens of thousands of arms raise light sticks to create a purple ocean.
The camera moves slowly in on the faces. Many of them are very young. Some are bored. Some are in ecstasy. Some look secretly elsewhere.
Voice-over
You are not just looking at a “mad” North Korea.
Or a “normal” South Korea.
You are looking at two distorted reflections of the same forces.
Ideology.
Capital.
Technology.
All converging on a narrow strip of land.
The music drops away, leaving only the sound of both crowds, mixed together into a strange, echoing roar.
Voice-over
And the uncomfortable thought is this.
That the line between them …
the line that seems to separate light from darkness …
is also the line that runs through the rest of the world.
Fade to black. The roar of the crowds continues for a few seconds in the darkness, then cuts out abruptly.
Žižekian Analysis 
