Madeleine Gavin, like many readers, was haunted by the story of Hyeonseo Lee, a woman who fled North Korea with her family in the 1990s and documented their perilous journey in her bestselling 2016 memoir The Girl With Seven Names.

But it also sent the documentarian down a months-long wormhole of dark-web research on the country and its notoriously oppressive living conditions under the dictatorship of Kim Jong Un. She used different VPNs (virtual private networks, which allow users to mask their IP data and avoid firewalls and other blockers) and searched in multiple languages.

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“And depending on which country I searched from,” she tells Yahoo Entertainment in a new interview, “I was finding different little pieces of not only crazy propaganda out of North Korea, but also this incredible hidden camera footage that these very determined and extremely brave North Koreans were risking their lives to shoot of what real life was like inside North Korea.”

Continue here: yahoo