North Korea and the movies were joined in the news together recently when the latest Seth Rogen/James Franco bromance The Interview rankled that notoriously image-aware country and led to warnings that retaliatory actions could be forthcoming. One movie studio hack and delayed movie release (from indefinitely shelved to streaming on Netflix in less than a month) later, the movie news cycle has moved onto other things (Spider-Man! Jeffery Wells is an idiot unworthy of discussion! The talismanic properties of Ginuwine’s “Pony” in the Magic Mike XXL trailer!) and this brief intersection of popular cinema and world politics has been relegated to the history books. But this is far from the first time North Korea and cinema have made headlines together, as effortlessly retold to us by author Paul Fischer in his book A Kim Jong-Il Production: The Extraordinary True Story of a Kidnapped Filmmaker, His Star Actress, and a Young Dictator’s Rise to Power.
In January of 1978, beloved South Korean actress Choi Eun-Hee was kidnapped on the Chinese coast by North Korean operatives who then spirited her away deep into “the bosom of the Great Leader, Comrade General Kim Il-Sung.” Her ex-husband Shin Sang-Ok, South Korea’s most famous filmmaker, ventured to China in an effort to discover her whereabouts only to suffer the same fate – drugged and spirited away on a freighter – leaving North Korea in possession of two assets capable of providing the boost to their film industry that Kim Jong-Il (not yet the Dear Leader, then only the Party Secretary for Organization and Guidance as well as Cultural Arts Director of the Propaganda and Agitation Department) saw as vital to both his country and own ambitions.
Thus begins the eight-year-long odyssey of both Choi and Shin as they are spirited through all facets of the North Korean experience – from the dizzying highs of opulent dinner parties that stretched into the early morning hours to the soul-crushing lows of a two-and-a-half year imprisonment in an ‘enlightenment center,’ forced to “sit in his cell in a cross-legged position, head down” and remain perfectly still with only 10 minutes daily allowed for moving. A fine job is done of charting out North Korea’s knotty political and cinematic history and the events and infidelities that had left Shin bankrupt and blackballed from the South Korean film industry and divorced from his beloved wife, with each player’s arc charting them for a collision course.
Fischer also does a fine job of tying Jong-Il’s love of cinema to his ascent within the party ranks, his uncanny ability to turn his entire country into a stage where every citizen plays their part in a large scale farce perpetuated through iconography and methodology gleaned from the movies he obsessively watched. He’s adept at teasing out the inherent comedy in such an absurd situation, without ever losing sight of the tragedy at its core. Shin and Choi are brought back together romantically by this imprisonment, and Shin is even given a paradoxical second chance at creating cinema when he and Choi are put in charge of the whole North Korean filmmaking apparatus.
And while the most famous product of that collaboration is the famously awful Godzilla knock-off Pulgasari, Fischer makes a strong argument for Shin having snuck modernity and notions of other societies into the archaic NK film industry whose work previously posited North Korea as the fulcrum on which the entire outside world pivots. True to its title, this is an extraordinary true story given color and heretofore unheard detail by Fischer, a thoroughly engaging combination of social history with white-knuckle thriller (multiple escape attempts will have you on the edge of your seat) that will prove engaging to both history and film nerds alike.
Purchase A Kim Jong-Il Production here, and be sure to catch his author signing/book discussion at Boswell Books this Monday at 7 p.m. with what is certain to be a lively discussion.
