The Lovers and The Despot

From one of the most bizarre regimes on the planet there’s no reason to expect anything other than an equally bizarre story. The scenes of mass hysteria at the death of supreme leader Kim IL Sung in 1994 are almost comedic but coupled with the information that if a citizen wasn’t hysterical enough they could be taken away and punished, very unsettling. But that is North Korea and it’s one of nuggets that comes out of this fascinating documentary of the life and times, kidnap and escape of South Korean director Shin Sang-Ok and his actress wife Choi Eun-Hee.

A successful director in South Korea Shin was rewarded with accolades, had a happy marriage and a two children. That bliss is shattered when Choi discovers that Shin has been having an affair – with a younger actress and had two children. There’s also the added complication of financial problems with the film company. She divorces Shin in 1978 and heads to Hong Kong where she is kidnapped by North Korean agents. Shin presumably very concerned begins to search for his ex and he too is promptly kidnapped and taken to North Korea.

So begins a very strange story of imprisonment, love re-joined, film making and keeping ruthless despots happy. Kim Jong-il leader of North Korea at the time was a big movie fan but frustrated by the appalling films that his country produced. The fact that film-makers didn’t have much scope other than big-up the joys of North Korean ideology probably didn’t cross his mind. What did was that good films could be used a powerful propaganda tool against the South. So Shin and Choi after imprisonment and reunion start to work for the regime and actually make watchable films that seem to keep Jong-Il happy. They do however fall back in love again and plot their escape.

Directors Rob Cannan and Ross Adam spent two years putting this together and managed to get a cast that could tell the story along with Choi (Shin passed away in 2006). So they collected together Hong Kong agents, ex CIA operatives and the escaped court poet to Kim Jong-Il.

The real eye openers though are the tapes that Shin recorded of his conversations with Kim Jong-Il. These reveal the dictator to be not someone you’d want around for tea but generally affable. The exchanges are friendly enough with Jong-Il espousing his contempt for the South and democracy in general. There are some exchanges that could be described as friendly banter but there’s little doubt who is the boss and Shin is ever deferential.

The story is mainly driven by interviews but the escape is filmed via the drama/doc method and looks incongruous. It is a tense section which is diminished somewhat by the hand-held camera and running about. Nevertheless, post kidnap it’s just as intriguing as the CIA, unaccustomed to defecting film directors, get far more interested once they find out about his links to the head of the regime, and start a debrief.

And so we come to another strand of the story. Shin was not welcomed back with open arms into his homeland, they believing he was actually a defector or at the very least sympathetic to the North once there. As such any respect he had as a filmmaker soon disappeared and he was forced to move to the US to work, where he never achieved anywhere near his previous success. Whether Shin was kidnapped or not, is debatable; there’s a reasonable case to be made for both. The filmmakers leave the issue hanging and it’s very much up to the viewer to make up their mind.