South Korean Propaganda?

Remember this scene? 

"I remember very well what pain the war and separation left us. I'm putting an end to it... We've waited for 50 years under those politicians, but unfortunately, they don't want reunification. It's like we're watching a well-written play... 'Our hope is reunification. We dream about it...' While you are singing songs like this, our people in the north are dying on the street. They barely manage to live on roots and barks. Our sons and daughters are being sold off for fucking 100 dollars! have you ever seen parents driven to the point of eating the flesh of their dead children? What with cheese, coke, and hamburger, you wouldn't know."

This movie shows a very stereotypical, under-developed North Korean characters. They are cruel (almost beast-like) and difficult. Uncivilized, violent, and above all, victimized. They are the victims who got the worst of the war and the separation.

This movie raises basic questions of a very complex issue of North-South relations. But I think it depicts the problem in ways which South Koreans want to see it. South Koreans are the rich, prosperous country holding the reign on the situation. They have the money, they have the food, they have the power to stop whatever mischief North Korean elite team is planning. North Koreans are the poor brothers on the North, starving to the point of eating human bodies, desperate enough to sell their bodies the Chinese... South Koreans as the big brother who must do something and help. (Also, because this movie was released around the same time period as Kim Daejung's Sunshine policy, it feels as an ambivalent critic of the policy.)

If I hadn't taken EAST 385 couple years ago, I might not have found anything disturbing in this depiction of North Koreans. Growing up as a South Korean, we are so embedded with the idea that the people of the North are the people that we must feel pity for, the brothers that we must save from poverty and oppressive government. Everything that Mooyoung says may be completely true... But I just feel very uncomfortable with the way the North is depicted here...