Children of the Secret State
2011 film by Carla Garapedian
Children of the Secret State is a documentary film about homeless North Korean orphans, released in 2000. It was shot by a UK film duo in conjunction with underground North Korean cameramen.
Synopsis
The movie opens with a clip of orphan children by Ahn Chol and speaks of the humanitarian situation in the country, and then introduces Ahn Chol, who has provided the covertly filmed footage of the children. Joe Layburn, who also narrates the movie, and his camerawoman, Anna Roberts, are then introduced, on their way into Pyongyang. Posing as tourists, they are to get an official tour of the country. Joe Layburn states that Pyongyang is 'like a multimillion-dollar film set' and that the atmosphere is 'eerie'. The movie shows the empty streets and unused fun fair and hotels, as well as the well cared-for 'children of the elite', whom he contrasts with footage of starving orphans filmed by Ahn Chol.
Layburn and Roberts then travel across the border to China to rendezvous with Ahn Chol and document the border and border town, using their own footage and interviews and the footage provided by Ahn Chol. Ahn Chol, who planned to meet up with the couple at the border, fails to turn up, but Layburn proceeds to interview refugees who have fled into China from North Korea. He then heads for South Korea and makes more interviews.
“Children of the Secret State” enters the record as 2011 film by Carla Garapedian. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Children, Secret and State can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Children of the Secret State” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Children, Secret and State provides the most credible route into that argument.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4669855. The first chronological checks are 2000.
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This entry incorporates text from “Children of the Secret State” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.