January 25, 2021
On February 13, 2017, two young women were caught on CCTV cameras as the primary suspects in the death of one Kim Jong-nam at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport. The victim was the eldest son of the late North Korean president Kim Jong-Il, and estranged elder half-brother to current president Kim Jong-un.
The two girls apparently went up to Kim and proceeded to smear an unknown substance on his face, before running off. Kim was dead within an hour. The mysterious substance turned out to be laced with a deadly neurotoxin. If the girls were proved to be guilty of this murder, they faced the death penalty by hanging.
Honestly, I never even knew an assassination like this even happened in 2017. At the start, I thought I was watching a work of fiction, but these events all turned out to be true-to-life. One girl Siti looked like a Filipina, but turned out she was a spa masseuse from Indonesia. The other girl Doan was an actress from Vietnam. Both girls came to Kuala Lumpur seeking greener pastures, only to be involved in this harrowing experience.
The documentary was told mainly in English, with various testimonies in Malay, Indonesian, Vietnamese and Korean, as it explored and expounded on several aspects of this multi-layered story. Not only was this a about a complex crime and controversial court case, there were also social-economic commentary, as well as the fascinating intrigues of international espionage, with even a political back-channeling angle on the sidelines.
Kim Jong-nam had been in self-imposed exile in Macau, China with his family for over a decade. He was perceived a legitimate threat to power, whether he liked it or not, so his assassination had suspicious implications. Director Ryan White had a rich and interesting story to tell, and he was able to capture all the dramatic twists and turns of this case and presented it with clarity and heart. 8/10.
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