In February 2017, Kim Jong Nam, the brother of Korean dictator Kim Jong Un was publicly assassinated by two young women, 25-year-old masseuse Siti Aisyah and 28-year-old waitress Doan Thi Huong. They were only dreaming of a show business future.
Aisyah and Huong watch their hands glistening with the VX nerve agent they were smearing right at the eyes and to the face of Kim Jong Nam, the brother of Kim Jong Un, the two women thought it was all a joke to be filmed for a show. But both were mistaken for some oil with the liquid VX, which can be lethal at any dosage. The surveillance cameras captured the shirt Huong was wearing just for the occasion: it announced "LOL." in broad black letters.
Both women washed their hands before leaving the airport and were arrested within days, mainly because their attorneys said they were just tricked, setting off years of legal proceedings and international media coverage.
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Investigators, however, were unswayed by the alibi. They accused Aisyah and Huong of murder. Each will be put to death if convicted.
In the previous attack, eight North Koreans were also suspected, but only one was jailed temporarily. Before the investigation had begun, four of them had already returned home.
Kim Jong Nam, who sent a letter to his brother Kim Jong Un 5 years ago at that time demanding mercy, pleading that his family had "nowhere to hide," had died while going to the hospital after the poison had drained his heart and lung muscles. In his final minutes, he was quoted as telling officials he had been sprayed with a substance. "Very painful," he said. "Very painful."
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Kim Jong Un and his brother's assassins story in the documentary
A documentary about the tricky assassination was made, and is available if requested, is entirely focused on the interviews with Aisyah and Huong and their families. Lawyers and outside experts, and surveillance footage of the killing, most shocking and most personal, messages and social media posts from the two women, are also shown in the documentary.
In summary, Assassins' offers perhaps the most full picture of Kim's death, the powers that set it in motion, and the two women who were left to face the justice system while the other killers fled, not aware of what they had done.
After the two women were arrested and put on trial, the headlines record what happened next: Aisyah was released late in her case, her charge dropped from her home country of Indonesia under diplomatic pressure; Huong, of Vietnam, pleaded with a lesser crime of causing damage with a dangerous weapon and has since been released from jail.
"This is a very absurdist, surreal story," documentaries Ryan White tells PEOPLE. "But at the center of it, it's sort of a cautionary tale of the dangers of social media, the internet, how people leverage those when they're seeking fame or a better life or a better paycheck. That story is universal. While Doan and Siti probably ended up in the most dangerous of situations, where that can go wrong, the world that they were ensnared in is happening all over the place for young people." he added.
The movie has the structure of a spy thriller but a heart that beats. "The main thrust of the film is humanizing them," White says. "That's sort of the magic of documentary filmmaking, is that it allows you the time to really explore those types of things."
Yes, it's outlandish about assassins, but so are the activities which it carefully tracks. Indeed, as the film makes clear, before their final work, the women believed they had been recruited for real videos and engaged in several real online pranks with their handlers.
