[imagesource:deathsgame/netflix]

Any form of South Korean entertainment is banned in the North.

Despite this, some are prepared to risk severe punishment to watch K-dramas, the shows with a huge global audience that everyone else can easily access on streamers like Netflix.

The BBC received rare footage showing North Korea publicly sentencing two teenage boys to 12 years of hard labour for watching these illicit shows.

The footage, supposedly filmed in 2022, shows two 16-year-old boys handcuffed in front of hundreds of students at an outdoor stadium while uniformed officers reprimand them for not “deeply reflecting on their mistakes”.

Usually, North Korea forbids photos, videos and other evidence of life in the country from being leaked to the outside world, so this video provides a rare chance to see how the dictatorship’s propaganda machine operates.

Apparently, the footage was shared by the South and North Development (Sand), a research institute that works with defectors from the North but it was reportedly originally distributed in North Korea for ideology education and to warn citizens not to watch “decadent recordings”.

The video includes a narrator who is repeating state propaganda. “The rotten puppet regime’s culture has spread even to teenagers,” says the voice, in an apparent reference to South Korea. “They are just 16 years old, but they ruined their own future,” it adds.

Back in the day, minors who broke the law in this way would be sent to youth labour camps rather than put behind bars, and the punishment was usually less than five years. This video suggests authorities are coming down harder on K-Drama watching.

Sand CEO Choi Kyong-hui said Pyongyang sees the spread of K-dramas and K-pop as a danger to its ideology.

“Admiration for South Korean society can soon lead to a weakening of the system… This goes against the monolithic ideology that makes North Koreans revere the Kim family,” she said.

In 2020, Pyongyang enacted a law to make watching or distributing South Korean entertainment punishable by death.

“If you get caught watching an American drama, you can get away with a bribe, but if you watch a Korean drama, you get shot,” a North Korean defector told BBC Korean on Thursday.

The defector said that for North Korean people, Korean dramas are a “drug” that helps them forget their difficult reality.

“In North Korea, we learn that South Korea lives much worse than us, but when you watch South Korean dramas, it’s a completely different world. It seems like the North Korean authorities are wary of that,” said another North Korean defector in her 20s.

Suddenly, watching Netflix leaves a sour taste in the mouth.

[source:bbc]