Director Ryan White and cinematographer John Benam on the documentary Assassins

When filmmaker Ryan White first heard about the murder of Kim
Jong-nam, the half brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in
early 2017, he paid little attention to the story until a reporter
called to let him know that it might make an interesting
documentary. Kim Jong-nam was poisoned in the middle of a crowded
Malaysian airport by two young women who smeared a highly poisonous
nerve agent on his face. On the surface, these women seemed like
bold, cold-blooded killers. But once Ryan and cinematographer John
Benam flew to Malaysia to find out more about the story, they soon
realized that the political assassination plot went deep, the women
might be innocent, and were likely duped by North Korean
operatives. The two women, Siti Aisyah and Doan Thi Huong, were put
on trial for murder in Malaysia. Ryan was able to speak with their
lawyers and eventually interview Siti and Doan. With help from the
women's defense lawyers, the Assassins editorial team painstakingly
pieced together all the security footage from the airport and put
together the entire sequence of events during the assassination.
They were also able to see and use within the film many of the text
messages the women exchanged with their handlers, which clearly
pointed to their complete ignorance of what they were getting into.
Ryan feels Assassins became controversial and had trouble finding
distribution not because of the political content, but because big
online companies feared retribution, as occurred with Sony Pictures
getting hacked by North Korea when they released the film The
Interview. Cinematographer John Benam has worked on several
documentaries with director Ryan White, beginning with the the
Netflix series The Keepers, about the murder of a nun and the
cover-up of sexual abuse in the Baltimore Catholic Church. When
John first decided to make a career out of filmmaking, he knew he
wanted to stay in Baltimore, and started working in a camera shop
during the switch from film to video. Luckily, Baltimore has a bit
of a film industry and he was able to work locally on several TV
shows, then got a job working for National Geographic shooting
nature documentaries. For Assassins, John and Ryan dove deep into
Siti and Doan's story, exploring where they came from and what
brought them to Malaysia. They felt it was important to have the
women tell their own story, and it required patience and
sensitivity. John is a mission-oriented, emotional cinematographer,
and shooting nature documentaries taught him the skill to sit
still, keep a low profile, and watch a story unfold. John had to
travel light and nimble, taking dozens of trips to Malaysia for the
story over the course of two years while the trial was going on. He
used two Canon EOS C300 Mark II cameras for shooting, because of
its lightness and small size, staying under the radar from the
general public. As he learned about the intricacies of the
Malaysian legal system and shot the trial, John felt very emotional
about the outcome of a guilty verdict for the women, which would
mean execution by hanging. You can watch Assassins streaming now in
virtual cinemas: https://www.assassinsdoc.com Find Ryan White:
http://www.tripod-media.com/ Find John Benam:
https://www.benamfilms.com/ Find out even more about this episode,
with extensive show notes and links: http://camnoir.com/ep111/
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