14 DAY TRIAL // It’s not that often that you get to see famous retired basketball superstar Dennis Rodman, 53, choke on his tears and struggle to continue an interview, but today is your lucky day. Rodman has filmed his 2014 visit to North Korea and the aftermath, and the footage is now being released as a film.
Footage from it has been released to Deadline, and is available for your viewing pleasure below. It was shot after he returned from North Korea and had started receiving death threats for what he called his own brand of “hoops diplomacy.”
Rodman had no idea of the atrocities committed by Kim Jong-un
The film is called “Dennis Rodman’s Big Bang in Pyongyang,” and will be released at the Slamdance Film Festival this month. Slamdance is like an anti-Sundance, in the sense that it has been established to offer a chance to all those films that were rejected by Sundance.
This was one of them, it seems.
The film is directed by Colin Offland and directed by Matt Baker, and will focus on Dennis Rodman’s uninspired choice of rallying up his former NBA mates to take part in a special event game on dictator Kim Jong-un’s birthday in 2014.
This was his second visit to North Korea and actually managed to be even more controversial back home in the US, because it made it very clear that Rodman wasn’t just buddies with the Supreme Leader: he was actually endorsing him and defending him from criticism regarding his cruel methods of staying in power.
Except that he wasn’t, Rodman defends himself in the video, as you can see for yourself below. He explains that his initiative to organize the basketball game was a one of a kind effort to solidify relations between the countries that no one else would have probably dared to do, but that he did it not knowing the crimes Kim Jong-un was being accused of.
He didn’t know that he had had his uncle and former right hand killed by a pack of rabid dogs, and he had no idea that he would usually have people executed if they dared to oppose him.
So either Rodman did not do his homework before either visit to North Korea, or no one told him when he got back from the first that he had just become friends with a criminal.
Rodman, target of death threats
But it’s when he speaks of the death threats he received that Rodman really breaks down. Whichever is his excuse for the visit, it does seem like he was honest in his attempt to help diplomatic relations between the two countries, the only way he knew how.
He really did believe he was doing the world a good deed, and he must have felt proud that he came up with the idea, even if he didn’t think it through. He’s equally saddened that he would be repaid with death threats because, as he sees it, at least he tried to do something about a situation that was bad.
“I’m not Martin Luther King,” he says at one point in the video. “If someone wanted to shoot me, please, do it today.”
When Rodman came back from his second visit to North Korea, after a very public meltdown on CNN, he checked into rehab for alcoholism. He is not expected to promote the film right now, but will probably do some media if it’s picked for wide release in theaters.
