How to make a movie ... North Korea style!
Kidnap the star, torture the director – and don’t just shoot a film, shoot the actors
WERE it not for the fact that North Korea is despicably tragic, it would be comical in the extreme. As a nation, it is so hermetically sealed — the regime lets ‘few foreigners in and virtually no information out’ — that the population has never heard of Jesus, Santa or Elvis.
They fully believe their Dear Leader, Kim Jong-Il, who died in 2011, was descended from an egg impregnated by the sun and that when he went into battle, he rode on a unicorn. At the grand age of eight weeks, Kim was walking, talking and dispensing sage military advice. He could control the weather and catch rainbows with his bare hands.
Such was (and is) the potency of North Korea’s messianic cult, however, that dare to laugh at such claims and a prison camp — or ‘custody management centre’ or ‘enlightenment centre’ — awaits.
Paul Fischer, in this gripping tale, tells us that a typical penal colony near Pyongyang, the capital city, is bigger than the entire surface area of Los Angeles, with 220,000 inmates.
Criminals include painters or poets whose work is ‘too Western’. The Ministry for the Protection of State Security rounds up people who have used more than the allocated quota of electricity, or have been accused of wearing blue jeans, growing their hair too long, reading a foreign newspaper or cracking jokes about Kim’s appearance (Kim Jong-Il’s son, the latest dictator, Kim Jong-Un, is another squat little monster, ‘prone to bursts of anger and bad temper’).
There are no trials — simply the whim of the current Kim. One person’s guilt implicates an entire f amily. ‘Children are executed in front of their mothers, wives in front of their husbands.’
Children who informed on their parents were commended for their patriotism. Husbands suspected of a political crime would beg to be able to shoot their own wives as a sign of loyalty.
In this evil hell-hole in Kim jongil’s time, ‘ chatter, laughter and singing were forbidden’. If Kim Jong-Il himself had one weakness, however, it was for the movies.
Though he had personal control over huge armies and a nuclear arsenal, Kim’s mind was filled less with totalitarian ideology than with ‘James Bond and Rambo . . . His favourite stars were Sean Connery and Elizabeth Taylor’.
It must be a mightily strange person who can confuse Elizabeth Taylor with Sylvester Stallone. Nevertheless, Kim set up the Central Film Distribution Centre, which obtained prints from abroad and secretly dubbed them into Korean using professional actors.
Fischer says Kramer Vs. Kramer and Mary Poppins were in the Pyongyang vaults — though only Kim was permitted to screen such incendiary foreign fare.
It was Kim’s dream to establish ‘a world- class film industry’ but, unfortunately, local productions were boring in the extreme — ‘tedious stories of selfless factory workers and exemplary farm girls’.
The studios had access only to a limited stock of ‘ill-fitting uniforms, wigs and detachable facial hair’. The sets consisted of a Tyrolean chalet and a fake vineyard.
Not only that, but actors and actresses often disappeared midscene. If they were ‘declared guilty of some obscure offence’, their performances would l i terally be chopped f rom the celluloid, ‘rendering the film unintelligible’ when shown. Nor was kissing or a
love scene ever depicted — emotion had to be reserved for the Dear Leader.
It was a rule that North Korea was always to be shown in rich sunshine. Scenes set abroad had to be uninvitingly dark and rain-swept.
In the wider world, Spielberg, Scorsese and George Lucas were emerging so, in 1978, Kim had the idea to abduct a director and star from South Korea, whose ‘knowledge and manpower’ would stimulate his own cinematic ambitions.
Shin Sang-Ok and his wife, Choi EunHee, who’d produced ‘melodramas, thrillers, historical epics and martial arts films full of frantic zooms and moving cameras’, were snatched from Hong Kong harbour, drugged and bundled into a speedboat by the North Korean ‘covert operations department.’ They were kept apart and for five years were held in solitary confinement or put under strict house arrest.
Choi was made to memorise passages from hagiographies of Kim Jong-Il and his equally demented father Kim IlSung. ‘You must bear some pain for the good of the revolution,’ she was told. At gunpoint, she underwent ‘daily compulsory ideology training sessions’. No debate or voicing of doubt was allowed.
Shin, having made a feeble attempt to escape, was flung into a prison cell, where he had to sit immobile in the same cross-legged position, staring straight ahead, for 16 hours a day.
If he swayed or blinked, he had to thrust his hands through the bars, so that his fingers could be ‘smashed violently with the guard’s baton’. But Shin was lucky. Other prisoners had their fingers and ears melted away by the sheer intensity and duration of electric shocks. No prisoner could sit or lie down, in any event, because the cramped cells were covered with spikes. Sanitation was non-existent.
Eventually, in 1983, when it was believed that Shin and Choi had been thoroughly indoctrinated, they were introduced to Kim in person — all 5 ft 2 in of him, in platform shoes and bouffant hair.
The Dear Leader invited his ‘guests’ to attend regular feasts and drunken orgies thrown for elite members of the Workers’ Party Central Committee and the Propaganda and Agitation Department.
THOuGH the remainder of the country was starving and poverty stricken — subsisting on frogs and mice — Kim indulged himself with imported exotic foodstuffs.
He collected motorcycles and Mercedes limousines, built luxurious villas, travelled on private trains and drank expensive Cognac — the annual budget f or Hennessy VSOP was $700,000.
He paid for all of this with the loans given to the country by Moscow and Beijing, the proceeds of organised crime and bogus insurance claims made against Allianz Global and Lloyd’s of London. Yet if ever a whisper of this excess or embezzlement got out, executions followed.
Assuring Kim that ‘I will take part in the revolution’, Shin agreed to make a propaganda film. Here, he believed, was a way of escape.
He encouraged Kim to permit a location shoot abroad in Budapest and Vienna. They had built up sufficient trust to be allowed to travel. Though surrounded by armed guards, Shin and Choi made a dash for it in Austria and hid in the American Embassy. They were flown to Virginia.
In time, Shin made Ninja films for the Disney Channel and was a juror at Cannes with Clint Eastwood. He died of liver disease in 2006.
Choi moved back to Seoul, South Korea, where she continues to live in obscurity, her history disbelieved by her neighbours who regard her as a defector, not a former abductee.
It does all sound almost too farfetched and, well, cinematic to be true, but Fischer assures us he has checked and double- checked the available facts. The book is a nightmarish, clammy adventure story, an absolutely brilliant page-turner.