When they did try to make “do not defect” stories they screwed it up.
But in the 1990s, the message of anti-South propaganda changed to address the undeniable fact of South Korea’s greater wealth, a shift particularly noticeable in the 1995 film “Two Soldiers (두병사)” and 2000 film “Your Son Came Back (아들은 돌아왔다).”
The two films narrate analogous stories of North Korean soldiers who are captured in the South and tempted to abandon their motherland for the capitalist paradise, but who ultimately reject the decadent and immoral South for the spiritual purity of the impoverished North.
The films appear to aim at stopping the wave of defectors then fleeing from the North. But the state’s clumsy propaganda was astonishingly counterproductive, grossly exaggerating the South’s devilish material splendor and readiness to share it in a way that only validated the decisions of those who choose to leave the DPRK’s “paradise on Earth.”
