Kidnapped and forced to make movies
Unfolding like a John le Carré thriller, “The Lovers and the Despot” tells the true story of two of South Korea’s brightest filmmaking talents, actress Choi Eun-hee and director Shin Sang-ok, who were kidnapped in 1978 by North Korean agents on the orders of dictator Kim Jong Il and forced to make movies to boost the North Korean film industry.
Directors Ross Adam and Robert Cannan’s documentary is told masterfully through archival material, film clips, spot-on re-enactments and interviews with those involved, including Choi herself, her children and U.S. intelligence agents and embassy officials who aided their escape (no spoiler there; the film opens with their news conference announcing their asylum in the United States).
The films and real-life romance of Choi and Shin captivated South Korean movie audiences in the 1950s and ’60s, but by the 1970s they were divorced and their clout was severely diminished. In 1978, Choi, then 41, was summoned to Hong Kong, ostensibly for a movie job. Instead, she was kidnapped by North Korean agents and smuggled on a boat to Pyongyang.
Choi’s disappearance made headlines across Asia, and though they were divorced, Shin went to Hong Kong to look for her — and he was grabbed, too. And that was the plan.
After years of “re-education” — he in prison, and she under the watchful eye of Kim Jong Il (Kim Il Sung was the supreme ruler of North Korea at the time, but son Kim Jong Il held much power, even though he didn’t take over as supreme leader until after his father’s death in 1994), they began to revitalize the North Korean film industry.
They made 17 films in a 2½-year period in the early 1980s — pretty good films, it looks like; Choi even won an acting prize at an international festival in Moscow. All the while, they were planning their escape. They secretly taped meetings with Kim Jong Il so that they could prove they were kidnapped, as opposed to defecting, and quietly waited for the right moment.
And they rekindled their love — getting remarried in 1983, a marriage that lasted until Shin’s death in 2006.
Shin never achieved the success in Hollywood that he achieved in North Korea. But he did cash in as a writerproducer of Disney’s successful “3 Ninjas” series, under the pseudonym “Simon Sheen.”
Sounds like a great Hollywood ending to one of film history’s most unusual stories.
After years of “reeducation,” they began to revitalize the North Korean film industry.