Kim Jong-il loved movies. In fact, the late North Korean leader loved them so much that he despaired for his country’s sub-par cinematic output. (“Why do our movies have so much crying?” he once asked, without irony.) His solution: kidnap some talented people to make North Korean films look cool.
Kim’s victims, director Shin Sang-ok and Shin’s ex-wife, the movie star Choi Eun-hee, were the perfect prey. They had been married and then divorced, had two adopted children, and were enjoying glamorous lives and flourishing film careers. Then in 1978, they disappeared, their story shocking South Korea.
Robert Cannan and Ross Adam’s documentary “The Lovers and the Despot” lays out the wild twists in their bizarre eight-year-long odyssey — one that would eventually involve both the international film community and the CIA — making it easy to see how the world could watch the events unfold and yet still wonder what was really going on.
One of Kim’s agents lured Choi to Hong Kong with the promise of film work. When she arrived, she was drugged and placed on a cargo ship; upon delivery to North Korea, she found herself greeted cheerfully by Kim, as though nothing unusual had just happened.
For his part, Shin’s journey involved four years in prison and brainwashing attempts, and when the couple was finally reunited, Kim put his human trophies on display. Under his control, they made movies: 17 of them in a two-year span. They were given budgets and creative freedom, sent to film festivals and presented as defectors happy to be exactly where they were. In Choi’s words, despite being cultural and political prisoners, the couple was treated with “utmost respect.”
It was a blurry mix of captivity and photo op, one that invited speculation and anger from South Korean media, some of it directed at the couple themselves. But Choi and Shin were already building a counter-narrative. They planned an escape, secretly recorded their conversations with Kim (who can be heard blaming the couples’ abduction on his staff) and waited patiently for the right moment. In 1986, while traveling, they set the plan in motion and, with the help of the CIA, escaped to the United States.
Juxtaposing archival footage and photography with a tension-building collection of interviews with intelligence agents, business partners and film critics (one of whom was eventually pressed into service to smuggle a tape to authorities), Cannan and Adam approach the outlandish crime as a puzzlement, all but wondering aloud how two celebrities could be stolen from public life and turned into a dictator’s puppets.
The filmmakers aren’t intrusive stylists. Flashes of vintage news reports situate the action in time, and film clips of unidentified movies made by Choi and Shin provide atmosphere, but otherwise this is a straightforward talking-head-filled doc, propelled by the testimony, some of it heartbreaking. Interviews with Choi’s and Shin’s adult children, and Choi herself, now 89 (Shin died in 2006), deliver a detailed and emotional capturing of their painful, harrowing experience. The captive couple’s vacant public smiles were cover. They were acting, waiting to make their break from Kim’s narcissistic playground.
The despot of the title, Kim is framed by the film as something of a side character in spite of his uncontested power, a figure of denial and delusion. On the surveillance tapes, he presents as petulant and needy, a human trafficking hobbyist, oblivious to the destruction he causes, which makes him even more politically relevant now than he’s been since his death.
And it’s possible, at least, that this was his very conscious approach to control. In Choi’s words, there were “two dictatorships, one physical and one emotional,” and he almost succeeded in exercising both over his captives. Had he simply chosen less famous victims — and, more importantly, less tenacious ones — he might have gotten away with his plan.
That tenacity and resolve of Choi and Shin’s determination to free themselves resulted in personal renewal. Remarkably, even crucially, considering the task they had before them, Choi and Shin fell in love again in captivity. Their estrangement gave way to trust, their shared goal of escape building itself on the ability two people with mutual understanding to make each other brave. In a time of active and aspiring despotism abroad and at home, their resistance may be the film’s most relevant lesson.