The North Korean government is doing everything to block “The Interview” from reaching its shores, but some North Koreans may get to see the Kim Jong Un-mocking movie soon, risking execution if they get caught with it.
This is thanks to a man named Park Sang Hak, a North Korean defector who’s now leading an activist group called Fighters for a Free North Korea. His organization is best-known for launching hydrogen balloons full of DVDs and USB drives with entertainment, human rights and pro-democracy content.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, Park plans to include DVDs of “The Interview” to the collection of materials he sends over to North Korea, as soon as it becomes available. He has partnered with Thor Halvorssen of the Human Rights Foundation in New York to finance his balloon project. Halvorssen says North Koreans have a “huge thirst for information from the outside world,” despite the risk of getting executed if found to possess any entertainment content from abroad.
"North Koreans risk their lives to watch Hollywood films ... and The Interview is tremendously threatening to the Kims. They cannot abide by anything that portrays them as anything other than a god. This movie destroys the narrative,” Halvorssen told the Hollywood Reporter.
For Park, this is just part of what he’s been doing over the past 10 years. He’s a well-known activist in North Korea, too, because of his project’s effectiveness in reaching North Koreans. In fact, the North Korean state TV once called him "Target Zero," indicating he’s higher than enemy No.1 on the country’s hit list.
Despite receiving multiple death threats along the way, Park sees the balloons as one of the very few ways to pressure the North Korean government.
"North Korea is surrounded by an iron curtain, so information can’t get in," Park told Bloomberg Businessweek.“But this way, using the sky, it can’t be stopped."
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