Synaps (2019)

With information in his pocket that has never been released before, Sinan Can travels to South Korea. There he speaks to people who have escaped the North Korean regime of Kim Jong-un. They show him that it is even more insane there than we thought.

Last time we brought information from a unique North Korean database. This time we show how far the regime will go to enforce loyalty to the leader.

In Guyana, a poverty-stricken country in South America, a huge oil discovery was made a few years ago by oil giant ExxonMobil, worth about 5 billion dollars. But Guyana is not very politically stable and suffers from enormous corruption and mismanagement. Moreover, the government knows nothing about the oil trade and has signed a 'strangulation contract'; worse than any contract with an oil producing country. Journalist Thomas Loudon travels to Guyana together with director Kim Smeekes to see what the country is doing with the oil discovery.

Sinan Can follows the route of the mineral talc in Afghanistan. He discovers something that consumers have no idea about, namely that by buying paracetamol or cosmetics, for example, they are unintentionally financing terrorism. Afghanistan is one of the richest countries in the world when it comes to raw materials. Gold, lithium, cobalt, marble and also talc. Terror groups such as IS, Al Qaeda and Taliban are after that country's minerals to finance their terrorist actions. From the mountains, where the talc is extracted, to its arrival at the port in Rotterdam, Sinan Can investigates how terrorist groups make millions from the mineral.