South Korean activists are finally making good on their promise to release the film in the Hermit Kingdom
Remember The Interview? While anybody who's actually seen the film might want to scrub it from memory, South Korean activists are still hellbent on sneaking the James Franco satire into North Korea. They announced on Tuesday that they would air-drop up to 10,000 copies via balloons around the end of the month.
The North Korean authorities have banned foreign films as propaganda and were especially unimpressed with The Interview, which follows a CIA plot to assassinate Kim Jong-un. In the movie, Dear Leader bites it in a helicoptor crash set to Katy Perry's "Firework" (seriously).
"Nobody can stop it," North Korean defector Park Sang-hak told the Guardian. "I will keep sending leaflets into North Korea at the risk of my life."
Park runs an organisation called Fighters For A Free North Korea, which first announced its plans to airlift copies of the film with some help from the Human Rights Foundation in January. The launch was later delayed, although Park did air-drop 100,000 anti-Pyongyang leaflets as a substitute.
North Korea opened fire on those balloons and have already warned Park that he will "pay for his crimes in blood" if The Interview even makes it over the border. But Park remains undeterred.
"We will set the exact date and location for our operation in consideration of weather conditions, but it will not be publicised," Park said. However, the air-drop is widely expected to take place around March 26 to commemmorate the five-year anniversary of the sinking of a South Korean ship which killed 46 sailors. South Korea blamed the North for the catastrophe and relations have been more than strained since.
Is it really that wise to drop thousands of copies of a movie into a country where citizens were reportedly executed for watching foreign films? And who's to say that North Koreans will even like the film anyway? We watched the film with a defector who told us: "I myself am a defector. But when I watched this film, I felt insulted." Even someone at Sony described the film as "desperately unfunny and repetitive", which begs the question: Does any country really need The Interview?
Watch the trailer for The Interview below:
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