North Korean Labor Camps

A journey through several countries to find those who really know Kim Jong-un, North Korea's leader, in an attempt to profile a contradictory dictator who seems to rule his nation with both disturbing benevolence and cold cruelty while being worshipped as a living god by his subjects in exalted displays of ridiculous fanaticism.

Under the loving but firm guidance of an old fan turned director and cultural diplomat, and to the surprise of a whole world, the ex-Yugoslavian cult band Laibach becomes the first rock group ever to perform in the fortress state of North Korea.

What happens when a group of international artists travel to North Korea to create art like the regime have never seen before? While the world is on the verge of nuclear war, a group of Western contemporary artists are invited into the eye of the storm. The aim is to collaborate with North Korean artists in a creative exchange project displaying new and challenging art in a country where abstract art is forbidden.

A cold odyssey over more than 8,000 km through contrasting territories, from the mountains of Mongolia to Lake Baikal, from the taiga to the Siberian tondra: this is the challenge that Nicolas Vanier has set himself. The adventure will last 18 months, 18 months during which Nicolas and his team face one of the most hostile regions of the globe before reaching the Arctic ice. An exceptional route, where only traditional modes of transport are used to overcome the constraints, each time different, of the regions crossed...

In 1917 Finnish explorer Sakari Pälsi travelled to Northeastern Siberia carrying a cinematograph and 13,000 feet of film with him. The journey produced a unique documentary film and a travelogue. A hundred years later director Kira Jääskeläinen returns to the Bering Strait in Pälsi's footsteps. Combining old and new film footage, Pälsi's notes and the stories of the local indigenous peoples, the film highlights the story of the Chukchi and Siberian Eskimos from bygone days till today.

Join National Geographic's Lisa Ling as she captures a rare look inside North Korea - something few Americans have ever been able to do. Posing as an undercover medical coordinator and closely guarded throughout her trip, Lisa moves inside the most isolated nation in the world, encountering a society completely dominated by government and dictatorship. Glimpse life inside North Korea as you've never seen before with personal accounts and powerful footage. Witness first-hand efforts by humanitarians and the challenges they face from the rogue regime.

Napalm is the story of the breathtaking and brief encounter, in 1958, between a French member of the first Western European delegation officially invited to North Korea after the devastating Korean war and a nurse working for the Korean Red Cross hospital, in Pyongyang, capital of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Could our mounting modern problems have ancient solutions? Travel to the depths of China to find out.

St. Petersburg, Russia, December 30th, 1916. Grigori Rasputin is assassinated. The story of the humble peasant who became the most influential adviser to czarina Alexandra Feodorovna, wife of the last czar, Nicholas II Romanov.

Getting into North Korea was one of the hardest and weirdest processes VBS has ever dealt with. They finally said, “OK, OK, you can come. But only as tourists.” At the airport, the North Korean consulate brought us to a restaurant and these women came out and started singing North Korean nationalist songs. We were thinking, “Look, we were just on a plane for 20 hours. Can we just go to bed?” but this guy with our group who was from the LA Times told us, “Everyone in here besides us is secret police. If you don’t act excited then you’re not going to get your visa. So we got drunk and jumped up onstage and sang songs with the girls. The next day we got our visas. A lot of people we had gone with didn’t get theirs. That was our first hint at just what a freaky, freaky trip we were embarking on…