The dictator who snagged me

When North Korea's film-loving despot Kim Jong Il kidnapped South Korea's leading director and his movie-star wife, the screen couple was plunged into a saga even stranger and more dreadful than the "Godzilla" knockoff they were forced to make.

By John Gorenfeld

March 12, 2003 | "The task set before the cinema today is one of contributing to people's development into true communists ... This historic task requires, above all, a revolutionary transformation of the practice of directing." -- Kim Jong Il's "On the Art of the Cinema" (1973)

"What a wretched fate," Shin Sang-Ok, now 77, remembers thinking after the meeting with the pudgy man in the gray Mao jacket. "I hated communism, but I had to pretend to be devoted to it to escape from this barren republic. It was lunacy."

Shin is a film director of legendary stature in his native country -- the Orson Welles of South Korea. He modernized movies at a time when people hungered for art, for escape, following the Korean War. He and his wife, the well-known actress Choi Eun Hee, were among Seoul's celebrity set. But in 1978, he ran afoul of the frequently repressive government of Gen. Park Chung Hee, who closed his studio. After making at least 60 movies in 20 years, Shin's career appeared to be over.

What soon followed, according to Shin's memoir, "Kingdom of Kim," was an experience that revived his career in a most unbelievable way. Shin and his wife were both kidnapped by North Korea's despot-in-training, Kim Jong Il, who sought to create a film industry that would allow him to sway a world audience to the righteousness of the Korea Workers' Party. Shin would be his propagandist, Choi his star.

Shin, reticent to talk about his experiences to an American reporter, instead allowed a representative to give Salon an English translation of "Kingdom of Kim," which has only been released in his own country in Korean. North Korean apparatchiks have tried to cast doubt on Shin's story, claiming he willingly defected to North Korea and absconded with millions. But Korea experts find Shin's story believable. Eric Heginbotham, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is one of many Kim-watchers who say it's consistent with what is known about the regime. Pyongyang now admits it captured 11 Japanese citizens in the late '70s and '80s to act as cultural advisors. Several died in captivity, some in suicides. "The abduction cases from Japan were a real eye-opener," Heginbotham says.

And one of the reporters who has met with the couple also says he has no reason to doubt Shin. Don Oberdorfer, formerly of the Washington Post and now a respected Korea scholar, says that of the many "questionable" defectors he has interviewed over the years, these two seemed very trustworthy. "I made it a practice not to repeat the various yarns about Kim unless I felt confident from reliable sources they were true," he said. "This one I believed."

But it's certainly as fantastical as many of his movies. Shin writes of being caught trying to escape, and spending four years in an all-male prison camp as a result, left to assume his wife was dead. Then, just as suddenly, he was brought into the inner sanctum of Kim Jong Il, the would-be successor to his father, Kim Il Sung, who ruled the country for nearly 50 years. Shin's talents would then officially fall to the service of North Korea, and he would make seven movies before he and his wife made a breathtaking escape in Vienna in 1986.

Not many have escaped to tell of the habits of the man who is now the most dangerous dictator in the world -- armed with nuclear and chemical weapons, and seemingly touched by madness. Shin's stories offer revealing glimpses of the man now threatening to "destroy the world." In fact, there is more than a passing resemblance between Kim and the insatiable Pulgasari, the communist Godzilla rip-off that Shin, at Kim's request, created for North Korean audiences, and which has become a camp curiosity for monster movie aficionados.

Shin says that shortly after arriving in Pyongyang he made several attempts to escape, and was punished with four years at Prison No. 6, where he lived on a diet of grass, salt, rice and party indoctrination -- "tasting bile all the time," he writes. "I experienced the limits of human beings." All the while, he received no word about his wife (who was held under house arrest) and so assumed the worst.

Then, in 1983, they were both released, and before long, reunited at a reception thrown by Kim Jong Il. Over soft drinks, the top party official finally, incredibly, explained why they were there.

"The North's filmmakers are just doing perfunctory work. They don't have any new ideas," Kim told the couple. "Their works have the same expressions, redundancies, the same old plots. All our movies are filled with crying and sobbing. I didn't order them to portray that kind of thing." The couple was stunned.

By 1978, Kim had become disgusted with his Mt. Paektu Creative Group, a studio that, as explained in Kim's 1973 instruction manual, "On the Art of the Cinema," was run on the "monolithic guidance" of party groupthink and named after the mountain where, according to state myth, a shooting star soared overhead, giving the universe's fiery approval to the soil of Kim's birth. (Actually, he was born in Siberia.) Kim told Shin he felt a "profound disappointment" with their work.

Next page: Shin Films is back in business