Kim Dong-Cheul was a journalist, but no one in North Korea knew it.
In June 2010, he secretly filmed daily life inside one of the most closed-off countries in the world, risking execution if he was discovered. Among his recordings is a scene that spread around the world: a 23-year-old woman, alone and malnourished, walking through the fields of South Pyongan Province collecting wild grass. When asked if it was to feed rabbits, she quietly replied no, that she planned to eat it. She had lost her parents and had no home or family; she slept outdoors and survived on whatever she found in fields and markets.
According to later reports, she died of starvation about four months after that interview, in a cornfield where she had gone to look for food. As she had no known relatives, her body remained there for several days before being found. Her name was never made public, but her testimony remained one of the starkest records of hunger under the regime.
