What drew you to this project? How did you get involved?
Ryan White: Kim Jong-nam was assassinated in February of 2017. To go back and look at history, that was Donald Trump’s first full month in office. Most Americans, when I talk to them about the assassination, remember it as a huge news story the day that it happened, but very quickly it subsided in the American news because so much of the airwaves were dedicated to Trump. The assassination became one of those stories that everyone remembers happened but they don’t remember exactly what happened. They remember bits and pieces, they remember that it was something sensational. People say, “Weren’t they female assassins?” And then they have some crazy version of how the women killed Kim Jong-nam, and those stories are always very elaborate and wrong: We’ve heard poisonous lipstick, we’ve heard darts, we’ve heard guns—everything but what actually happened.
I was one of those people too. But in late 2017, a journalist named Doug Bock Clark reached out to us. We had just released The Keepers on Netflix, which had become this true crime phenomenon, and Clark had written an article in GQ called “The Untold Story of Kim Jong-nam’s Assassination.” It was a really amazing investigative deep dive into the Indonesian woman Siti Aisyah. It was pretty explosive and one of the most popular online articles that year. Doug happened to have gone to the same university as me. We didn’t overlap, he’s younger than I am, but he knew I was a documentary filmmaker, he’d heard of The Keepers, and he was getting a lot of outreach from documentary companies to option his article. He reached out just to say, “Can you give me advice on this?” So Jess and I had a phone call with him and after that phone call we thought, “Maybe we should do this project ourselves.” Just a month or two later I went with Doug to Malaysia on a preliminary trip where he and I and a cameraperson met a lot of the undercover sources that he had used in his article and also Siti’s lawyers. That shoot solidified for me that this was too amazing of a story not to be part of. The trial of Siti and Doan Thi Huong was just getting started so we knew we had a great through line and that we could return to Malaysia to film at key junctures. That was the beginning of what became a two-year long shoot. And Doug is one of our executive producers on the film.
Jessica Hargrave: As much as many people, Ryan and I included, recognized when the story broke that it was so bizarre, once we dug into it, it was even more bizarre. That was really striking to both of us. Initially we had no idea about what had actually happened so when we found that out, we knew we wanted to do this project, to learn more, to get to know the people who were involved.
The way that you’ve constructed the film, it creates a real sense of apprehension about whether Siti and Doan will be found guilty and put to death. Since you started filming at the beginning of the trial, what was it like to be on that rollercoaster of not knowing what would happen to them?
RW: I think worldwide almost everyone presumed that Siti and Doan were guilty, that they must have been part of this regime in some way, or that they were paid assassins. No one would ever jump to the conclusion that two people could be tricked into pulling off a major political assassination. Then having read Doug’s article and been on the ground in Malaysia with people who were saying, “Wait, wait, you need to look at all of the evidence, we need to show you the full story of the background of these women,” that was the most eye-opening part. As we began to entrench ourselves in the worlds of the women—which are completely different worlds, Siti and Doan are from different countries, they have different backgrounds, they have different educations—it was really chilling, the idea of what might have happened to them.
We were always very careful of assuming that they weren’t assassins, and I think that is the real process that unfolds through the film—by the end there is a glaring absence of evidence that they were knowing assassins. That was the real emotional process for us. And because I consider myself a very personal documentary filmmaker—I like getting to know the people I work with and living inside of their lives for a few years—it was so strange to make a film where the main characters were two women I had never met. I got to see them every day as they were escorted into court with Uzis but I’d never physically spent any time with them or spoken to them. That was a different way of filmmaking for us and eye-opening as well.
At what point in it all did you conclude the women were not guilty?
RW: Once the lawyers opened up and we saw the evidence. One of the real cachés of our film is that it documents the actual evidence—evidence that never came out in court, or in the press for that matter, because the women were released before the defense had to present.
I’ve done films about lawyers before, law is by nature the most conservative and careful industry in the world, so to make a film side by side with them can be pretty tricky. We probably spent more time with the lawyers than anyone else to win their trust. And once both legal teams were willing to turn over everything that they had—the women’s digital footprint, all of their text messages, all of their social media profiles—and we were able to look through it and connect the dots ourselves on their communications with the North Koreans and the people who connected them to the North Koreans, there was just such an absence of anything that pointed to their knowledge of what they were doing. It was during that research that it became obvious to us that they might have been duped.
Once you had the sense that they had been duped into this, was it hard to watch them on trial?
RW: Totally. Everybody on the ground thought that they were going to be convicted, the odds were so stacked against them. So the more we realized that they might be innocent and the further it got into the trial and the more likely it looked that they were going to be executed, the more heart-wrenching it was.
Somewhat morbidly we assumed that because they were going to be convicted and sentenced to death, we were going to have to have our film ready to go at that very moment. Our plan was to release the film right after they were convicted but before they were put to death to try to start a sort of international outcry, to use our film to prove their innocence since it wasn’t coming out in the courtroom. Until that day that Siti was released—which was totally shocking to everyone and probably the most surprising day of my documentary filmmaking career—we thought that was the direction the trial was headed.
The lawyers are very compelling, very smart, and clearly very dedicated to their clients. How did they come to be representing Siti and Doan? And were you struck by their dedication to their clients?
RW: Siti was represented by the Gooi & Azura law firm. They have a contract with the Indonesian embassy in Kuala Lumpur so any time an Indonesian citizen in Malaysia is on trial facing the death penalty, they get that case. They automatically appeared for Siti from the moment she was charged. Doan’s situation was a little bit different: The Vietnam Bar Association ended up hiring a team to represent her, three different lawyers in two different firms. Hisyam Teh Poh Teik, the main character in our film who’s her representative, is a big-time lawyer in Malaysia and in death penalty cases specifically.
We feel that Siti’s and Doan’s lawyers don’t get enough credit for how brave what they were doing actually was. They were two of the only groups to publicly point the finger at North Korea in a way that the Malaysian government would not, in the way that other foreign governments would not. It was almost as if nobody wanted to take on that assertion, to say clearly that even if these women were the assassins, they were not the masterminds. The lawyers were so unafraid of doing that from the moment I met them. These are people who don’t have their own protection, people living day-to-day lives in Kuala Lumpur, a city North Korean agents had obviously infiltrated to organize this whole plot. But they were so unafraid of pointing to what the real story was. I don’t think that they get enough credit so hopefully the film shows that.
The two journalists you include in the film are also very compelling. How did you find them?
RW: Hadi Azmi, the Malaysian journalist, we found on the ground. I’m not the type of filmmaker who puts myself in my films so there was no real shepherd to take us through the trial or Malaysian culture and the Malaysian judicial system. Then we met Hadi. The press was at the courthouse every day of the trial and most members were from all over Asia—we were one of the few Western teams that was always there. Everybody got to know each other really well because court would last all day long and you’d just be sitting outside waiting for press conferences or to find out what happened that day. We were really compelled by Hadi right away, and especially because he works for an international organization, he was able to somewhat circumvent the restrictions on press freedom in Malaysia; we knew his reporting was allowed to go outside the scope of what some other Malaysian reporters were allowed to do. So we began spending a lot of time with him. In the film, he tells the story of what is going down locally.
Anna Fifield, who is the Beijing bureau chief of the Washington Post, is pretty renowned as a journalist and she published a book last year called The Great Successor, which is an amazing account of Kim Jong-un. Kim Jong-un is so often lampooned, as we know that led to the whole Sony hack a few years ago, how he was portrayed in that film. I feel like he’s often seen as a caricature—he’s laughed at, Trump calls him “Rocketman”—and Anna’s book really traced his pathway to power in a way that treats him seriously. When we read her book, it was like a missing link from our film. We’re verité filmmakers who were following this trial and these women’s lives, we didn’t have that big-picture view of the arc of Kim Jong-un’s rise to power and what role Kim Jong-nam’s assassination played in that rise. So when we read Anna’s book we knew she was the perfect person to tell that story.
There’s a theme to the whole story about vulnerability and the exploitation of young women—it’s almost as if they have to force themselves to be gullible because they’re so desperate to survive and find a way forward. Is that something that drew you to the story or something that you hadn’t really been aware of but that you became more aware of as you made the film?
JH: I think that definitely drew us to the film. The story feels so bizarre, and so distant that in a way your first thought is that you don’t relate to these women. And then as you dig deeper into it and you realize exactly what happened to them, you recognize that this could have happened to anybody—that this appeal of fame and opportunity and a better life, particularly when you are more vulnerable, could lead you to do things that others may see as ridiculous.
I think when you’re hoping so much to find a better life for yourself and you’re presented with something that seems like it will give you that, of course you’re going to want to do it. And also they had seen it happen successfully to other people around the world, people who had found fame and fortune with social media and Internet opportunities. So it didn’t seem far-fetched that it could happen to them.
What’s so interesting about it is that in the end it did bring them fame but for the worst possible reason, for a crime neither of them knew they were committing. To see them toward the end with all of these cameras was just so ironic because in a way that’s what they both wanted but certainly not under those circumstances.
Did you sit around and wonder how on earth the North Koreans came up with this plan?
RW: That is something that we were always batting around. And there’s going to be no answer. No one will ever know why it was done in such a spectacle. There are various theories around the personality of Kim Jong-un, who loves the world of pop culture and spectacle, that perhaps that world influenced the choice of the way to do it.
The one common denominator that most people come to is that this murder was a message to opponents of the Kim regime that you’re never safe no matter where you are, that they can get you at any time. This murder was so brazen and so terrifying, done in a public space, all over camera, by people who might not even be assassins and in a way that would grab the headlines in a sensational way. It’s warning to all of North Korea’s enemies.
JH: Even though there are so many factors that implicate North Korea and specifically Kim Jong-un, we can’t say for sure. Assuming he is responsible, he had so many ways and opportunities to kill Kim Jong-nam and yet he chose to do it this way. He created an international spectacle. He had women from two different countries, he did it in a major international airport in a third country, so already he’s roping in the governments of three countries, who all have to decide how to deal with him and what to do about these two women who are left to be the scapegoats. I agree that’s it’s showing the power that he has and it’s also showing that he can get away with anything and that he doesn’t care if other people suffer as long as he gets what he wants. When Siti says, “They thought I was nothing,” yes, they did. They left the women behind to take the fall and got their own people out immediately.
What was it like after the trial was over to film Siti and Doan back in their home countries?
RW: To me they were the most famous of famous people by that point, I’d been tracking every part of their lives. So it was surreal. I met Siti first and then Doan later. I’d been at Siti’s house a couple of times already to meet her family, but to show up there and see her actually walk out of the door gave me goose bumps in a good way like, “Oh my god, how did she survive this?”
A few months later, I got to meet Doan on the day of her release—I literally met her on the airplane before we took off for Hanoi. Her lawyers brought me to her seat and introduced me to her. To get to shake her hand and say, “I’ve been making a film about you for two years, I’m so happy that you’re safe and that I get to meet you in person” was a very special moment.
They’re both almost the opposite of how I perceived them through the trial. I thought Siti was going to be this very quiet and meek persona. But she has a huge personality, fun and jovial. Meeting her really humanized her in a way I had not gotten during the trial. I felt, this is a young woman who’s just like any of my friends or any of the people I grew up with. And she could have died multiple times: She was exposed to VX and she was facing the death penalty.
When I met Doan, she was much quieter than I imagined she would be. She had had such aspirations for so long to be famous and she had tried so hard to reach that goal. It was sad to see her spirit and ambition somewhat broken by this whole experience.
What for each of you is the most powerful moment in the film?
JH: Every time that our team followed the women at trial, day in and day out, the women were immediately escorted onto the elevator and up to the courtroom. And one day the elevator wasn’t there on time so the women had to wait a second and our cameraman was able to get this single shot of Doan clenching her fists with her handcuffs on. That shot gives me goose bumps because you can just feel what she’s feeling. Her hands are bound behind her and she’s feeling emotion and that’s how she expressing it—with these hands that she can’t move as she walks into a courtroom where she listens to a trial that’s not in her native tongue and faces the death penalty. It just brings it home to me what she was feeling inside that whole time for years of trial not knowing what her fate would be. That was the most powerful moment for me.
RW: When I watch certain scenes, I’m back in those moments. There’s a place in Hanoi called Hay Bar and it’s where Doan was recruited by the North Koreans. To actually go to that place—undercover, just me and my DP John Benam and a Vietnamese fixer—to go to this tiny little bar in a bustling part of Hanoi and to be in this place where Doan said that everything changed in her life… we were sitting next to North Koreans because North Koreans are everywhere in Hanoi. Also, that moment when Siti walks out of the courthouse. We had heard the same thing that Hadi says in the film, that something big was going to happen that day. But we never imagined that it would be her leaving the courthouse as a free woman. To see her walk out of the courtroom without handcuffs was so shocking and confusing.
What would you like the impact of the film to be?
RW: I feel that the nexus of the film is the exploitation of young women. I think even though this story goes in the most warped, bizarre, perverse direction, in the end these were women who were exploited because of the circumstances that they were in, who were vulnerable. And that is happening worldwide. One of the more heartbreaking parts of the film is when Doan says that the world used to be pink to her and now she won’t trust people in the same way that she did. It’s so sad because that was robbed from her, why shouldn’t she be allowed to be trusting? But this film illustrates how dangerous the world can be if you are too trusting.
JH: I hope that people will realize that they should look beyond the headlines, to try to understand the deeper story.
I do think that one of the things that’s a beautiful part of the film is the friendship of these two women. They were judged so harshly and so quickly, they had no connection besides this one horrible moment in time for each of them, and they were able to form a lasting friendship through different languages and jail cell walls.