Two days before the June 12 summit with President Donald Trump and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un, National Geographic will premiere Inside North Korea: Race to Peace, a new documentary from writer/producer Robert Zakin that taps archival footage and new interviews to chronicle the diplomatic milestone.
Among the dignitaries and experts featured in the film are former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Bill Richardson, former governor of New Mexico and U.S. North Korea emissary.
“I think he [Kim Jong-un] does have a good hand to play,” Albright says in the one-hour special. “He has managed to scare the whole region into doing something.”
Nat Geo describes the the June 10 documentary (Christine Weber is executive producer) as “an unflinching look back at the complicated diplomatic history of the region, with a trained eye on the future.” The special’s intention, Nat Geo says, is to place the June 12 summit in “proper historic context.”
(On a side note: National Geographic magazine, the channel notes, actually played an unintentional role in the creation of North and South Korea. In August 1945, with WWII nearing its end, the U.S. sought to divide the Korean Peninsula, with the State Department’s Charles Bonesteel and future Secretary of State Dean Rusk tasked to determine how to divide the zones of occupation. They chose the 38th parallel based on a National Geographic Society map).
Inside North Korea: Race to Peace premieres on National Geographic Sunday, June 10, at 10 pm ET/9c.
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