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When filmmaker Ryan White heard about Kim Jong-nam’s assassination at the airport four years ago, he knew the story was extraordinary, but he had no intention of making it a movie.
Months later, he thinks again – plunging him into a dark world of intelligence and geopolitical agents he knew next to nothing about.
White has been making documentaries for over a decade. The best known is probably The Case Against 8, on the legal fight for gay marriage in California.
“Then in 2017 we all noticed how bizarre Kim Jong-nam’s story was,” he says.
“The bizarre story of the North Korean leader’s half-brother killed at Kuala Lumpur airport by women smearing him with a deadly nerve agent – then claiming it was a reality TV prank.
“And I would love to say that immediately I knew there was a movie in it. But really I didn’t.
Kim, 45, died from contact with a VX nerve agent in Malaysia before even arriving at hospital. Within days, two women were arrested for his murder.
Doan Thi Huong was 28 years old and was from Vietnam and Siti Aisyah was 25 years old Indonesian.
Kim Jong-nam was not in favor of his half-brother Kim Jong-un, who had been the supreme leader of North Korea since 2011.
For a few years he lived in exile in Macau, and the new documentary includes footage of Kim Jong-nam speaking on camera.
But White didn’t begin to perceive the story as a film project until after an approach from reporter Doug Bock Clark.
“Doug Clark said he’s writing an in-depth investigative article for GQ magazine. He told me there was a lot more to the headlines than ever before – the timing of Trump’s inauguration meant Americans hadn’t really been following history for very long.
“Doug explained that the two women in Malaysia had to stand trial with a mandatory death penalty if they were found guilty. They were sticking to their story of being set up to believe they were on a reality show when they messed up Kim.
“At that point, it seemed inconceivable to me that this could be a defense. And my experience with The Case Against 8 made me swear never again to make a film built around a trial: it had involved over 600 hours of filming with all the difficulty of editing.
“But the more I thought about what Doug had told me, the more I could see that the trial could provide the three-act structure that you often look for in a documentary. So a few weeks later I was on a plane to Malaysia.
“It wasn’t until much later that I started to think that what the two women were claiming seemed unlikely… but they were starting to convince me. Could they even be innocent?
CCTV footage has become a staple of crime documentaries, often taken for granted. Without access to video of what happened at Kuala Lumpur International Airport on February 13, 2017, White says his film might have been impossible to make. For more than a year, police and other bodies in Malaysia have refused to release material, beyond a few moments already widely seen.
The director won’t comment on how the CCTV recordings eventually emerged, but they are an extraordinary part of the film. Yet how does he know that footage of Kim’s attack and what followed (the women are seen quickly leaving the stage) weren’t edited or manipulated?
“There were thousands of hours of footage to go frame by frame – there were multiple cameras on everything. A small section is missing – otherwise we can report every moment. We had to buy special burner computers to process all the DVDs – and we spent three months doing it.
The two defendants came from different countries and had had very different life experiences.
White traveled to meet the two families who agreed to cooperate in the film. “I think for them I was just another type of press looking for a quick interview rather than someone making a great documentary.
“But it was part of our trajectory of thinking at first that these women were probably lying. Then, over a period of several months, I realized that what they were saying added up. But it was a very slow revelation.
Most of the time the film was shot, the women were in prison. Aisyah was released in March 2019 and two months later, Huong was also released.
During the two and a half years spent on his film, White had no direct contact with the North Korean government. Or at least he thinks not.
“Maybe it’s just paranoia, but I think with a project like this you can sometimes email someone – but do you know for sure that the person you are with communicate is who she claims to be?
“There was a point last year where we had a premiere for the movie and I was communicating with Doan through Facebook.
“But I realized that the anger messages she was sending didn’t sound much like Doan, and didn’t even sound like the type of English she would use.
“So I messaged him on a different app and we realized that someone had imitated their Facebook profile in a very sophisticated way to communicate with me.
“May I point the finger at the North Korean regime and say that it was manipulating Doan’s messages at the time?” I can’t know for sure, but there have been other instances where things like this have happened. “
But does White think a massively secretive regime like Pyongyang’s, almost completely isolated from the outside world, will be interested in how it is portrayed in an American documentary?
“It’s hard to say anything definitive about North Korea. But they chose to commit murder in an extremely public place – so maybe they’ll think the more publicity the better. There were endless security cameras recording every moment in this airport.
“Kim Jong-nam could have been killed in another way in another location. So what is the justification for an assassination in this extraordinary manner?
“Kim Jong-un and those who work for him wanted a very public murder to show the world what happens when people displease the supreme leader of the nation or get in his way. Even if they are family.
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