The Lovers & the Despot

Cert: Club. Showing in IFI

The outright weirdness of North Korea and its vicious ideological repression lend this documentary an immediately striking disposition. Add to this some Cold War intrigue and even a dash of life-imitating-Hollywood bemusement and The Lovers & The Despot belongs firmly in the realm of ‘couldn’t make it up’.

Shin Sang-ok was one of South Korea’s biggest names in filmmaking, while his wife, the actress Choi Eun-hee, was a big-screen goddess. In 1978, the pair were lured to Hong Kong and kidnapped by North Korean agents (complete with bundling and sedation) and brought before Kim Jong-il who was adamant that Daddy’s dictatorship have a thriving film industry to show the world what it was capable of.

Once they had accepted their lot, the couple conspired to secretly tape their meetings with Kim, and it is in these grainy recordings that things get very odd. Kim’s reedy voice can be heard apologising to the couple about their treatment like a charming Bond villain and complaining about his people being “so closed minded”.

Things blur slightly in the account. Once he’d stopped trying to escape, Shin liked the absence of budgetary constraints in this new work environment. South Korea was also quite dictatorial and repressive back then, so maybe things weren’t quite so alien for the pair. Shin Films had a helpful cheerleader in the soon-to-be supreme leader but for how long? What if the heir grew bored with them? At a festival in Vienna, they plotted their escape.

A curio from the fringes of movieland, indeed, but interviews and archive clips remind you this was no game for Shin and Choi.