CHANNEL4 FILMS: CHILDREN OF THE SECRET STATE PART 1 OF 3
Children of the Secret State is an investigation into North Korea, considered by many as the last Stalinist dictatorship, a hidden and sealed country riddled with propaganda and saturated with hostility to democracy and the West.
Joe Layburn and the Hardcash team discovered a young North Korean, known by the pseudonym 'Ahn Chol', who has been filiming undercover so that the world can see what is going on in his native land: the country where his parents both starved to death.
His devastating footage shows some of the estimated 200,000 street children, mainly orphans, foraging for food in the mud and the gutters, ignored by the adults around them and ignored by the state which claims they are at its bosom. Joe embarks on a state-run tourist visit of North Korea, revealing vast unoccupied hotels, empty boulevards and countless monuments of Kim Jong II, the county's leader. It seems that the government is considerably more interested in the appearance of wealth and stabilty than it is about the welfare of its youth.
He then speaks to people with first-hand knowledge of the situation in North Korea: a farmer, forced to grow opium to fund the army; an ex-soldier with tales of concentration camps and gruesome executions; and various people who have seen human flesh for sale.
At the end of this film, we could not be sure of Ahn Chol's safety as he had not met our team as arranged, and we feared the worst: if he had been caught filming he would have been imprisoned, and probably executed. But since then we have heard that he returned safely to China. In February 2002 Ahn Chol was awarded the prestigious Rory Peck award for features, for the bravery and quality of his undercover footage.
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