When Kim took the term ‘film buff’ to an extreme
“WHY do all of our films have the same ideological plots? There’s nothing new about them. Why are there so many crying scenes?” This complaint about North Korean cinema – articulated in the fascinating documentary The Lovers and the Despot – comes from an unusual film critic: Kim Jong-il, who, as the film reports, went to extraordinary lengths to boost the stature of his nation’s cinema.
The lovers (later to become wife and husband) of the title are Choi Eun-hee and Shin Sang-ok, an actress and a filmmaker who made a series of well-regarded films in South Korea, beginning in the 1950s. By the 1970s, their Shin Films had attracted the attention of Kim Jong-il, the heir apparent to his father, North Korean dictator Kim Il-sung.
“To me, he seemed like an artist who loved films,” Choi says, in an interview looking back on her captor, who died in 2011. In hindsight, her appraisal of Kim seems overly generous, considering that he kidnapped her in 1978, along with Shin some months later, from Hong Kong. Because they were detained separately, it would be a few years before the couple, who had gotten divorced before the ordeal, would meet again. After their reunion, Kim forced Choi and Shin to maintain a gruelling schedule, sleeping only a few hours a night while working on 17 films during a 27-month period.
If we’re to believe Choi and Shin, they weren’t forced to make the kind of pro- paganda films that were being cranked out by the North Korean film industry. Rather, Kim genuinely seemed to want Shin to make the same kinds of movies that the director had once made in South Korea. So the couple produced the first North Korean love story, as well as a monster movie.
Utilising a dramatic score and grainy re-enactments, much of Lovers has the look of a vintage spy thriller. Co-directors Rob Cannan ( Three Miles North of Molkom) and Ross Adam spin this seemingly incredible story by fairly conventional means, intercutting archival footage of Kim’s reign with clips of Shin’s films, along with talking-head interviews and audio clips that the couple surreptitiously made of their conversations with Kim.
As a court poet who later escaped the North Korean regime explains, brainwashing once led him to believe that Kim was a god who didn’t use the toilet, and one may speculate whether Shin, who died in 2006, and Choi, now 89, were brainwashed, too. Many Koreans today do not believe that Shin was actually kidnapped.
How, a viewer may ask, is creative freedom possible under such Orwellian conditions?
Late in the film, we watch Choi’s family in tears as they listen to her voice on a recording smuggled out of North Korea. On one level, this appears to be the same kind of crying scene that inspired Kim to complain about North Korean film. Lovers suggests that any film – even this one – can have the manipulative power of propaganda. Despot. TheLoversandthe