Seoul (AFP) – Hollywood comedy “The Interview” has won a few fans in between sparking apocalyptic warnings from North Korea — but for defectors who escaped the communist state, there’s nothing funny about it.
That’s not to say they’re not watching it. Defectors based in the South have flocked to see the film at the centre of an escalating international row thanks to its lurid depiction of the assassination of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un.
The United States claims that the film’s presentation of Kim — whose family has ruled the reclusive, impoverished state for more than six decades — prompted Pyongyang to launch a massive cyber-attack on Sony Pictures, the studio that made it.
“Every defector I know has seen the movie,” said Kim Sung-Min, who fled the North in 1996 and now runs the anti-Pyongyang Free North Korea Radio station.