Written by Theron Peterson
May 14, 2026
Dear Friends,
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way.”
Thus begins Charles Dickens’ celebrated novel A Tale of Two Cities. This week, I’ve been struck by just how appropriately those words map onto the tale of the two Koreas. And taking it a step further, how the two Koreas reflect our own journey with the Known By Name Foundation. Allow me to set the stage.
It’s December 1997, and the Asian Financial Crisis has reared its ugly head in South Korea. The Won, the national currency, has collapsed; foreign reserves are depleted; major companies are filing for bankruptcy; unemployment is surging; and a desperate bid for a bailout from the International Monetary Fund is the last hope for salvation.
The Korean conglomerates like Samsung, LG, and Hyundai had driven much of the growth in the preceding years, and during this time of crisis, the government began to investigate how different industries impacted the economy. In the midst of this, a report began to circulate that the American film Jurassic Park had generated revenues equivalent to the export of 1.5 million Hyundai vehicles. So what did the government do?
South Korea invested in media.
The government moved fast. In 1999, they established the Korean Film Council (KOFIC), a state-funded body that invested in domestic production, filmmaker training, and international distribution. They enforced a screen quota requiring cinemas to show Korean films a minimum number of days per year, protecting the local industry long enough for it to find its footing. At the same time, entertainment companies like SM Entertainment began pioneering what they called "culture technology": a systematic approach to manufacturing music acts from the ground up. Trainees, some as young as 12, were recruited and spent years in intensive programs learning to sing, dance, act, and speak multiple languages before ever performing publicly. Nothing was left to chance.
K-pop wasn't successful by luck. It was designed.
The results speak for themselves. Within a decade, Korean films had gone from a fraction of their domestic box office to commanding over half of it. The Korean Wave (Hallyu) swept across Asia first, then the world. BTS became the first Asian act to top the Billboard Hot 100. Parasite became the first non-English-language film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Squid Game generated an estimated $900 million in value for Netflix in its first month. What started as a government response to a currency crisis became one of the most deliberate and successful cultural export strategies in modern history. South Korea looked at a moment of desperation and asked: What if the most powerful thing we can make is a story?
Now contrast that with North Korea. While South Korea was building a machine to tell its stories to the world, North Korea was building a machine to keep every other stories out. The Kim regime understood the same truth South Korea had discovered. Story is power. And so they did what every threatened regime does: they seized power. They seized the stories. The state produces its own films, its own music, its own art. Every frame, every lyric, every brushstroke exists solely to glorify the Kim family and cement the ideology of Juche.
There is no creative freedom. There is no independent voice. Culture isn’t an export, but a weapon.
And the punishment for citizens with unauthorized weapons is severe. In 2020, North Korea enacted the "Law on the Elimination of Reactionary Thought and Culture," making it a criminal offense to watch, possess, or distribute South Korean media. The same law made possessing a Bible punishable by decades of forced labor…or execution. In 2021, they went further, extending those restrictions specifically to children through the Youth Education Guarantee Law, because the regime understood that they weren’t threatened nearly as much by missiles and sanctions as they were by a teenager who had seen what life looked like somewhere else. Who believed something needed to change.
Think about that for a moment.
While South Korea was asking, "What if story is the most powerful thing we can make?” North Korea was answering: “Exactly. Which is why we must control every single one.”
AND THEN THERE'S THE KNOWN BY NAME FOUNDATION Which brings me to us, and to why I think Dickens would have found this situation very familiar. South Korea built an empire to tell its story. North Korea built a prison to bury its history. Meanwhile, a small foundation in the United States is trying to make one film about two people who escaped oppression, but we’re doing it without a government behind us, without a cultural ministry, without a training pipeline, a screen quota, or a billion-dollar entertainment conglomerate. We have a script in progress. A team that believes in this story. A community of people like you, willing to pay attention. The conviction that one right story, told with honesty and heart, can do what no system ever could. And we have the freedom to do it that others don’t.
Dickens didn't have a studio either. But he had a story that demanded to be told. So he told it. And this week I’ve realized something: That is what we are doing. Trying to tell a tale not of two cities, but of two Koreas. Here’s to hoping we might have some of the impact Dickens did.
Best,
The Team at Known By Name
