A Kim Jong-Il Production

Author: Paul Fischer

When I first heard this story on This American Life, I just could not believe my ears. It was a fascinating and bizarre tale of kidnapping and movie-making in North Korea that seemed too outrageous for anyone to even make up as fiction. I had to learn more about this and I quickly found a book that described it all. I promptly searched my local library and checked out a copy of the book. 

As expected, this was a page-turner with Shin Sang-ok and Kim Jong-il taking center stage. You learn about the fascination that Kim Jong Il had with movies and how it influenced pretty much everything he did in North Korea.  He was very frustrated with the poor quality of North Korean films and decided to fix it by direct intervention. He found the most famous director (Shin Sang-ok) and actress  (Choi Eun-hee) in South Korean Cinema and had them kidnapped and taken to North Korea. As it turns out they were formerly married to each other, and he conveniently re-united them after the kidnapping.  Some of the early details after the kidnapping don’t make much sense and hopefully, one day, someone will discover a diary of Kim Jong Il that will shed some light on what his plans were in the first few years after the kidnapping. For a man who was obsessed by movies, he seemed to be in no hurry to put these two talented individuals to work.

The book gives you a good glimpse into the life of folks in the higher echelons of North Korean government. You will wince at the way people are treated in North Korean and the level of isolation they feel is something that is hard for us to comprehend in the western world. Especially in this day and age where once you have access to the internet, you pretty much have the ability to instantly acquire information from all corners of the world. 

In some ways Shin Sang Ok got to relive his dreams of directing movies even though he was always under the watchful eye of Kim Jong Il and his security guards. Read this book to learn all about the craziness of the North Korean Dictator, his obsession with making movies and the casualties in the process.