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This one comes from Gordon Flake at the Mansfield Foundation. (Keep those cards and letters coming folks—you think we have time to make up all this stuff ourselves?) He writes, “I found this article fascinating and perhaps worthy of your analysis.....striking in that I think this is probably genuine.....the North Koreans simply cannot conceive of the non-profit organizations. They get business and government, but not much beyond. Gordon” Worthy of your analysis!? Sort of reminds me of Ian Anderson’s description of the music of Jethro Tull: “We make it faster and louder!”
Anyway, said article “Film Festival the “Fabricated Scheming of Rodents!” is by Kang Mi Jin and Daily NK. It reads in its entirety:
‘Uriminzokkiri’, North Korea’s main online propaganda outpost targeting the South, has heavily criticized the upcoming North Korean Human Rights International Film Festival, calling it “fabricated scheming” and “a provocative farce made by rodents.”
Writing on the 14th, the website run by the North Korean Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland declared that the films to be screened at next week’s festival are “blasphemous and defame our great socialist way with the masses at its center.”
It went on, “The South Chosun media is frenziedly advertising these films that can be watched for free at the ‘North Korean Human Rights Film Festival’, but it would be unthinkable for movie makers in competitive South Chosun to screen films for free that required the mobilization of vast human and material resources.”
Concluding therefore that the entire festival is a confrontational conservative plot, it went on, “If funding hadn’t come from the government then it would have been impossible for this to happen."
Meanwhile, the 2nd annual North Korean Human Rights International Film Festival is to be held at Film Forum in Shinchon on September 20th and 21st. As correctly noted in the critical Uriminzokkiri article, all films and the opening ceremony in Seoul Station Plaza on the night of the 20th are free and open to the public.”
And your wise men don’t know how it feels to be thick as a brick.
