Special to WorldTribune.com

Video footage smuggled out of North Korea shows an open air public trial of two men who are condemned to a labor camp for a “grave criminal act” which includes watching an American film.

The video, filmed secretly in September 2013, shows the two accused men, aged 30 and 27, standing in front of a large crowd as the charges against them are blasted out of loudspeakers attached to a van. The men are then sentenced to at least nine months at a labor camp for crimes related to “the corrupt ideology of capitalism.”

According to a report in the London Telegraph, the men were accused of watching an (unnamed) American film, putting it on a USB stick and copying it onto a DVD recording device.

The North Korean judge presiding over the trial says that one of the defendants is “a person immersed in the corrupt ideology of capitalism” and tells the crowd that the criminal acts were “revealed by agents in South Korea operated by our party.”

Experts say that common offenders in North Korea are usually sentenced to time in labor camps for what the Kim Jong-Un regime calls “re-education” that includes long days of manual work, heavily rationed food, forced ideology lessons and little sleep.

Accessing and watching American films is considered a serious crime against the North Korean state, even though Kim Jong-Un’s father, Kim Jong-Il, was a reported film buff whose favorite actress was Elizabeth Taylor.

Kim Jong-Un, since coming to power after his father’s death, has reportedly set up 114 surveillance teams to crack down on foreign media, particularly from South Korea, as the soap operas and dramas contradict his message that the North is far superior to the impoverished South. In October 2014, it was reported that 50 people had been executed for watching soap operas.

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