Word: koreans
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...most recent anti-South probe began in September, after authorities caught a group of students in a university computer lab watching a new South Korean disaster film, Haeundae, according to the North Korean Intellectuals Solidarity (NKIS), the Seoul-based defectors' organization that Myung now manages. The group says it learned of the arrests from an antigovernment cell at a North Korean university, which they regularly contact to gather information from inside the hermit state. Inspection teams have also been purging border cities where the movies are smuggled in, and even executing some smugglers in public as a warning, according...
...Since the communist North and the South signed an armistice in 1953 that halted the Korean War, the two neighbors have been at loggerheads over issues of censorship. The state-run media in the North has long derided South Korea's "decadent foreign culture and ideals," and has banned nearly all South Korean, American and Japanese films in favor of 1960s Soviet and Chinese films rife with revolutionary ideas. Foreign films are allowed to be shown in some contexts, such as the Pyongyang International Film Festival held every other fall, and in recent weeks state television has occasionally shown Disney...
...Whether or not these rarified, fictional glimpses of their freer and richer neighbor have any real sway over North Korean youth is hard to say. "There are lots of stories on that from the defectors," says Lee Jong Ju, deputy spokesperson of Seoul's Ministry of Unification. "They said they can see [South] Korean soap operas in North Korea, and then that could be one of the reasons they decided to go to South Korea," says Lee. Others contend that while North Koreans may be increasingly curious about the outside world, that doesn't mean they're having fantasies about...
...crime carried a sentence of five years in a prison camp; today, enemy-propaganda watchers are usually handed a sentence of three months or less of unpaid labor, according to two refugees in Seoul. The shift may not have been an ideological one: Myung, who served in the North Korean police just last year, says that the regime made the decision because it couldn't afford to send so many people to prison camps. (See rare pictures from inside North Korea...
...when students are caught, they buy cigarettes for police officers to escape labor sentences, and sometimes even give officers the bootleg to watch themselves. "I used to believe strongly what the government told us - that foreign films are crazy and violent. We used to be terrified of watching South Korean dramas," says one North Korean university student in Seoul, who remains sympathetic to the regime. "But I've opened my mind." At least one student under investigation has lobbied authorities to legalize foreign films with no political message, according to a newsletter by the defectors' group...