Taking “film buff ” to new lengths

Documentary. Unrated; subtitled. 124 minutes.

“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 grueling schedule, sleeping only a few hours a night while working on 17 films during a 27-month period.

If we are to believe Choi and Shin, they weren’t forced to make the kind of propaganda 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.

Many Koreans today do not believe that Shin was actually kidnapped.

How, a viewer may ask, is creative freedom possible under such Orwellian conditions?