Thumbnail Attribution: https://www.flickr.com/photos/146433335@N03/25288059449
This article was originally written from the 28th of June to the 4th of July 2023 and first publicly released on the 24th of February 2024
Hello there! A while ago Massi told me about how he would be updating his website, (editor’s note: It was a long fucking time ago) and mentioned the idea of me being able to write some articles to it, similar to some of the blog posts he worked on previously, so in between some other projects I’ve decided I’ll start writing one.
I felt like talking about the first MEGA documentary we did together, which was our first big project together overall, while I had given some feedback before on previous content, like the [oscuro] documentary on HAB-12, this was the first project where I did a lot of the writing and research, our first proper collaboration, that MEGA project was “Yeonmi and North Korea”, I think it would be interesting to talk about the making of that documentary from my perspective.
Fascination with North Korea #
So firstly, how I got started on this whole topic, I’ve had a kind of fascination with North Korea for many years before we worked on the documentary, because it was a country that seemed so alien to anything I knew, a very different political system, culture and way of life, and because it was only ever really presented in the Western media with hostility.
Image Attribution : https://www.flickr.com/photos/12005945@N03/8679021411
You basically never see the other side of the coin and get an almost cartoonish view of the country, an aggressive “rogue state” led by a crazy dictator who starves his own people to maintain power and holds everyone hostage with nukes, this made me more and more curious over time and I really got invested in the subject, listening to all the North Korean music you can find on the internet (whether that’s marching bands and war ballads or weird pop songs), watching lots of documentaries like the VICE videos touring North Korea and checking out various vlogs and other videos by random tourists and journalists who snuck into the country.
But there were a few videos in particular that caught my eye, a series of videos about North Korea called “We Went To North Korea To Get A Haircut”, “How to write a North Korean News Story” and “IT’S JUST A SANCTION, BRO!” by Boy Boy, which scrutinised the Western media portrayal of the North, criticising its use of stereotypes as opposed to actual research or nuanced reporting, using sensationalistic terms like “the regime” instead of “the government”, “death squads” instead of “the military” or “prison camps” instead of just “prisons”, and pointing out that the supposedly “targeted” sanctions that “only affected the elites” in North Korea actually had a dramatic effect on the overall population.
I also discovered the phenomenon of so-called “celebrity defectors” who fled the DPRK and ended up telling unreliable stories that often ended up as the basis for many of these shoddy articles, the stories of how defectors were sometimes treated as second class citizens in South Korea, and how South Korea overall wasn’t as rosy as it portrayed itself, the fact that for essentially the entire Cold War the country was a military dictatorship, even though the Korean War of the 1950s is even now sometimes presented to Western audiences as a war between democracy and dictatorship, with South Korea and its allies fighting for freedom.
I found that this dictatorship had also placed vulnerable groups like the disabled and the homeless into concentration camps to “purify” the streets in preparation for the Olympics, and how the country had also held some of the longest running political prisoners in the world, North Koreans who had been kept in jail indefinitely for refusing to defect to the South.
From a South Korean documentary called “ The Dynamic Development of Korean Democracy” I also learnt about their struggle against martial rule and how there had been protests against the US because of their role in the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, a revolution against the South Korean dictatorship ( the US had actually helped preserve the South Korean dictatorship in the 1980s by freeing up South Korean troops to crush the uprising, although they denied knowing what would happen, it was later proven that these denials were false).
And on top of all that I learnt about how even after South Korea democratised, there were still major issues, with rampant corruption problems and a massive scandal where the country’s intelligence services had been caught meddling in elections in favour of conservative candidates using psychological warfare campaigns, this was all a world away from the crazy evil North Korean regime portrayed in our press and the idyllic prosperous South Korea portrayed in the world of K-Dramas, and it all added up to a conversation I really wanted to have.
I also came across some documentaries that broke the usual mould of stereotypes and generic rhetoric about North Koreans being shut off, brainwashed robots, the 2 that I remember were “My Brothers and Sisters in the North”, a documentary by a Korean-German filmmaker who visited North Korea and carried out extensive interviews with people living there, where you got to see North Koreans as people living the same sort of lives we do, focusing on jobs, caring for their families, that sort of thing, and a documentary by a Korean-American filmmaker called “People are the Sky”, which offered a nuanced explanation into the division of Korea and its modern history, featuring interviews with Koreans from both sides of the border, including a mix of random bystanders, soldiers and experts like historians and university professors.
All this research came from a mix of sources, browsing through Wikipedia, random YouTube or search engine searches, and sometimes Pro-North Korea or Communist social media accounts, although I’m not a Communist or anywhere near that line of thinking, it’s just that these are some of the only spaces where seeing the “other side of the story” is fairly common.
The “Historical.ly” outlet in particular was a source for a lot of the early history material about Korea before it was divided, how the US propped up Japanese colonialists in South Korea and how there was already a government in Korea, the People’s Republic of Korea, after Japan was defeated but before Korea was divided, I was shocked to find this out at the time as its a piece of history that almost no one seems to know about.
Early writings and discovering MEGA #
So I started writing about the whole topic in 2020, putting together a script for a video that I never properly named, but the text file was rather lazily called “Truth of North Korea”, so let’s just go with that, my idea with this “Truth of North Korea” documentary wasn’t to sanitise the North but to try and correct the record on the story of Korea’s 2 halves, pointing out that a lot of the conventional narrative about this story we have in the West is based on propaganda, a mix of stereotypes, half-truths and outright lies, it was one of 2 documentaries I had the idea to work on at the time, the other one being about the War on Terror.
At the same time as I was working on these scripts, Massi told me about his idea for a new documentary series that would follow [oscuro] (his first experiment with documentary making), he called this series “MEGA”, which he described to me as “a series about unusual topics which maybe sound a bit strange on paper, but I think would be interesting to watch”, and a “mix of absurd and interesting”, a few possible topics for this series were floated around, from drug use, to interviewing NEETs, to the issue of political extremism and dehumanisation, but at the time it was just a concept.
Not long after I left my drafts of the North Korea and Terror scripts as they were, I produced a prototype of the first part of the Terror Script but never released it anywhere, I had no real experience in making videos like this and I didn’t really have the equipment for it (my microphone at the time was especially low quality and produced lots of static), so as much as I was passionate about the topics I wasn’t confident in my ability to do them justice, so for a long while they ended up being dormant.
But the topic of North Korea was still on my mind, and I talked to Massi about it semi often, until at some point in 2021 I told him about Yeonmi Park and some of the baffling things she said, especially how she’d told Joe Rogan that it would take months to go places in North Korea, because people would have to “push the trains”.
Quite quickly this got his attention and sent him down a rabbithole of watching her interviews and the videos on her YouTube channel, and he decided he wanted to make a documentary about the topic, that’s how MEGA: Yeonmi and North Korea was born.
Starting our collaboration #
Initially the documentary was called “North Korea’s Phony Defectors; Yeonmi Park”, and Massi ended up buying Yeonmi’s book to read and scrutinise it, finding it riddled with contradictions when it was compared to the stories she’d told to other sources, I decided to offer up all the research I’d done on the whole North Korea topic to him and we worked on the script together, he put his focus into Yeonmi’s story and the whole “celebrity defector” phenomenon while I focused on the geopolitics side of things, bringing in issues like the Korean War, the sanctions, the nuclear weapons, that sort of thing.
Though we both looked at both of these aspects of the topics, and I was interested in doing this kind of detective work on Yeonmi’s story, searching for all of the contradictions between her book and the various interviews she’d given to the media, which we kept stumbling across more and more as we went on.
One of my inspirations for looking into this was a video by Canadian Conservative commentator JJ McCullough called “They tried to get me to post Chinese propaganda”, and a followup he made called “This Chinese Cult is not Your Friend” the videos went into a cult called Falun Gong that had been agitating against the Chinese government and discussed how a lot of their rhetoric was very questionable and how US conservatives had often aligned themselves with the group.
JJ made the point that one of the biggest lessons of the Cold War was that the enemy of my enemy is not always my friend, and how we can’t win a battle of ideas if we align ourselves with cranks and other unreliable figures or organisations, that resonated with me a lot when it came to Yeonmi and how many had more or less unquestioningly believed her story because she was speaking out against North Korea, despite the fact that she was clearly an unreliable narrator.
Massi also reached out to Yeonmi, asking her if she wanted to take part in an interview where we’d put the contradictions in her story to her and give her an opportunity to explain them, given that she’s only taken part in uncritical interviews where her story wasn’t scrutinised (the closest we’ve seen to this is a chat she had with Dennis Prager, who wasn’t critical and shared an agenda with Yeonmi, but did ask a lot of questions about her experience) I thought that the chances of her taking up the offer were low if we were honest about the fact that the production would be critical, but Massi didn’t want to be misleading or have any sort of “gotcha” interview (and rightly so), as I suspected she didn’t take us up on the offer and we got no response.
Many of the topics I brought up in my original “Truth of North Korea” script ended up in the final MEGA documentary, but the end result was quite different, my original script only made 1 mention of defectors as a source for dodgy news stories related to the North, and never mentioned Yeonmi Park, while Yeonmi and the celebrity defectors were basically the foundation of the MEGA documentary, with my geopolitical interests sort of built on top of it.
Cut content, tone and sourcing #
Some other topics that didn’t make it in were a much longer history of Korea (which my script had going back to 918 with the foundation of Korea as a state) and much of the commentary about South Korea post-Korean War, the only part of that that was kept in was the commentary about how North Koreans were second class in the South, those topics were axed so we could keep a more consistent focus on the issues surrounding the documentary: Celebrity defectors and the misinformation surrounding North Korea.
While we saw our work as journalistic, we didn’t want to hide our opinions or make any attempt to seem “unbiased” or “neutral”, and with setting the tone for the episode we took a lot of inspiration from Penn and Teller’s Bullshit, a show we’d been watching at the time, this meant in practice that we didn’t feel a need to stay too professional, we’d use swears, tell lots of jokes, be opinionated and unapologetic in our presentation.
But we always wanted to make sure that even though we were being opinionated, we were also being accurate, and this was helped by a weird quirk: German law, when using clips from media like videos you didn’t make yourself, you’re supposed to source them under a law called the “Schrankenregelung” (part of the so-called “Schranken des Urheberrechts” or “Copyright barriers”), and this got us into the habit of sourcing everything, including the resources like articles and research documents we were getting our information, which we linked throughout the script and in a full list at the end of the script, which we displayed on screen as part of the credits sequence.
While I did keep sourcing in mind to begin with, this prompted me to pay more attention to the sources I was using, and when I was adding citations to the documentary, leading to a production that was more well researched and transparent about where we were getting our information, and by extension our opinions, from.
Much of the sourcing I’d done for the original “Truth of North Korea” script was fairly useless and just linked to Wikipedia articles, not that Wikipedia is a bad source, lots of Wikipedia articles are really well written and based on reliable evidence, but just copypasting a Wikipedia article really isn’t good enough, so thanks Germany, you helped me get a lot better at sourcing my claims, even if it was indirectly!
Production and technical difficulties #
During production Massi experimented a lot with the visuals, making use of props like Airsoft guns and Yeonmi’s book, which was riddled with sticky notes after he went through annotating everything, and coming up with some quirky intermission screens to connect the chapters, similar to the intermissions that we’d used as ad breaks for the [oscuro] documentary.
The one big problem we came across during that process was the audio recording not working out with the on-camera footage, which was a very big problem as on-camera presentations by Massi made up a lot of the documentary’s runtime, he ended up having to choose between re-recording the whole thing or dubbing the dialogue in during the edit.
He went for the dub option and I think that was a great idea, as he managed to sync up the dubbing with his on camera speech really well, its noticeable to me that the dubbing is there, but that’s because I already knew, I think if you watch it as a casual viewer you probably wouldn’t notice it at all, and even if you did it wouldn’t bother you.
Ultimately while I think the documentary has its faults, for example the scrutiny of Yeonmi and the Geopolitics not blending very well (which makes sense when you consider that they’re almost 2 different documentaries mashed together), I’m still very proud of the production, it made the points we wanted it to make and did so really creatively.
I’m especially proud of the sanctions and nuclear sections, although I’m biased because those are the sections I put a lot of my time into, I actually think what really makes them work is the visuals, which is all down to Massi, for example the really creepy contrast between footage of actual victims of nuclear blasts with the cheerful “duck and cover” cartoon was really powerful, and the clips of landscapes littered with artillery shells shot by the US military all over when making the point about whether North Korea or the US is more war or “police action” crazy, I loved seeing my words being illustrated so well in the edit.
The response to the documentary, UFO followup #
And while the video had a very modest audience size, that audience received the video positively and got the message we wanted to portray, seeing comments like “mind blown”, “It really makes you look at North Korea and especially Yeonmi differently now”, “this documentary is a very huge and important work”, really shows that it was worth the time investment.
There were some people who just really wanted to believe Yeonmi and didn’t want to acknowledge any of the facts we brought forward, accusing us of working for the KFA (a network of pro-North Korea activists), claiming that all of the contradictions in her story we pointed out were semantics or otherwise not important, or claiming that the dubbing made the production “suspicious” (how Massi dubbing himself over is suspicious I don’t really know, but to each their own), but it was mostly just entertaining to see the mental gymnastics people put into ignoring our points, and knowing they were only a small minority of the viewership did help.
Once the documentary was finished we weren’t quite done with the topic, as we kept following Yeonmi’s content for a while, with Massi working on a podcast episode talking to Serene Desiree (another content creator who also put out a video talking about Yeonmi) and he later produced a short report calling Yeonmi out for a specific video of hers, a she uploaded of a North Korean news report using fake subtitles about “UFOs” from a parody account and passing it off as if they were form the official state media, which led to her fanbase assuming that North Korea had massacred a city and blamed it on UFO kidnappings (yes, seriously).
Interestingly, it seems either Yeonmi or someone associated with her was keeping up with our content, because even though that video only got a few hundred views on release, the UFO video was quickly deleted from Yeonmi’s channel not long after we criticised her for posting it.
Influencing others and Conclusion #
One of the goals we really set for this project was “planting a seed” in people’s minds, encouraging people to think about this topic with some more nuance and in a less sensationalistic or propagandistic light, it’s not really about viewer counts or anything like that, it’s about encouraging people to think more about these issues and spread that mindset around.
And one interesting way that ended up happening was by inspiring another videomaker, Parallax, who later made his own documentary on the topic called “Yeonmi Park - From Activist to Grifter”.
You can see a lot of the influence of our work on his, with the same sort of structure of going from the issues with Yeonmi’s personal story, to the questionable reporting on her YouTube channel, to the Geopolitics, as well as a lot of the sources used and general points made, some of that was just a natural overlap that was bound to happen because he was covering the same topic, some of it was him taking inspiration from us, a clip of the MEGA documentary was even used in the geopolitics section of his video!
I think he managed to take inspiration from our work and go further, blending the issues surrounding Yeonmi and the geopolitics much better than we did, uncovering even more contradictions in Yeonmi’s stories, and giving the topic a different tone, with a mostly more serious feel as opposed to our edgy Penn and Teller style, I said at the time I watched his video that it was almost like I was watching the video I originally wanted to make, although I’m really happy with MEGA, I think he found his own way to do the topic justice too.
The only thing about his work that I didn’t agree with was his references to North Korea being a “Fascist” or “State Capitalist” country, I think that whatever you make of North Korea it’s quite clear that the country’s ideological leanings come from the far left, whether that’s influences of Marx, Lenin, Stalin or Mao, not Hitler, Tojo or Mussolini, after all the North Korean state was founded by soldiers who fought against the Fascist Japanese Empire, the references to so-called “state capitalism” just don’t make sense to me when a country like North Korea just doesn’t have the same profit based system as Capitalist countries do, the DPRK has probably reformed the least out of all of the old Eastern Bloc countries still around, still prioritising central planning over markets and it’s a country where all the billboards are taken up by propaganda instead of advertising, but that was a criticism with 1% of a video I 99% agreed with.
And that video ended up getting over 200,000 views, so it’s great that these ideas are reaching more and more people. I’ve been seeing memes popping up of Yeonmi’s picture put next to baffling nonsense recently, so it shows these works are having an impact. Interestingly I also saw that Yeonmi’s Wikipedia page has been updated recently, with the short criticism section that was on her profile previously being expanded into a full “veracity of claims” section that goes into specific contradictions in her story, mentioning how blatantly partisan she is, bringing up the “no word for love” and “gobi desert miracle” issues, mentioning all the different versions of the “executed for watching a movie” story and reporting other defectors and experts saying the whole thing was probably nonsense, along with a bunch of the contradictions in her family and escape stories, when I looked in the talk page for the article many of the Wiki editors were discussing how unreliable Yeonmi was and how problematic it was that the article hadn’t scrutinised her enough before, so people really are getting the memo.
Parallax is planning a second part to his video which will discuss Yeonmi’s new book, which goes into how the US is apparently in danger of becoming a Communist country like North Korea, we were thinking of making our own response to this when we first heard of the book, before it released, but I think for us the whole topic of Yeonmi and North Korea is over now, because we’ve ended up shifting our focus with MEGA to discussing the Ukraine war and plans for other topics, I know I’m quite happy to hand the baton of this topic over to Parallax so I don’t have to watch any more of Yeonmi’s interviews, hopefully his video will be a great watch!
If you want to read the original “Truth of North Korea” script that inspired the final documentary, you can find it linked below:
And if you want to check out the finished documentary, you can do so right here:
Changelog #
- Edit 1 - 24/02/24 - Added mention of “This Chinese Cult is Not Your Friend” video, fixed a link to [oscuro], added “Destroyer of Worlds” intermission clip
- Edit 2 - 24/02/24 - Some restructuring of “Fascination with North Korea” section - Adding extra sources and info surrounding the research on South Korea (Development of Korean Democracy documentary, sources on NIS and corruption scandals, Olympics “purification” campaign and political prisoners), cut useless extensions from some source links
- Edit 3 - 25/02/24 - Added an example for “memes popping up of Yeonmi” line, added editor’s note disclaimer for the link to the doc at the end, added note on original writing date of the article, more link shortening
- Edit 4 - 06/03/24 - Added a link to the “Truth of North Korea” script at the end of the article, replaced MEGA: Yeonmi and North Korea video embed wih article link
- Edit 5 - 07/03/24 - Updated release date disclaimer with specific dates (it originally just had the months the article was originally worked on, now it has specific dates as well as the date of the release on the site), changed article date to when the article was finished (as opposed to when it was first released publicly) and added line to split disclaimer from article
- Edit 5 - 30/05/24 - Hyperlinked Massi’s contributor page
- Edit 6 - 04/09/24 - Linked Ukraine War tags page to a line mentioning that topic