During the 1960s, director Shin Sang-ok and his actress wife Choi Eun-hee were South Korea’s most glamorous movie couple. “He was cool,” explains Choi, now 89, and the primary interview subject of this fascinating historical documentary. In an old photograph, we see Marilyn Monroe looking simply delighted to be pictured next to Choi.
Shin and Choi had already divorced in 1978 when Choi disappeared while supposedly meeting a producer in Hong Kong. For a while the authorities imagined that Shin might be involved, a theory that gained traction when the director arrived in the British protectorate – to assist the police with their inquiries -– only to vanish too.
In fact, Choi had been nabbed, drugged and taken to Nampo Harbour, where she was greeted by her biggest fan: movie junkie and North Korean dictator-in-waiting Kim Jong-il.
Kim was not unkind to his 'guest'. He screened the Soviet classic The Forty-First for her, handed her Communist literature and invited her to various functions. Her former husband's experience was far more bruising: he spent more than five years in prisons and concentration camps, before being reunited with his ex.
Kim, who was dismayed by the low standard of domestic film production, hoped that the couple could put North Korea on the map as a cinematic power. Choi and Shin soon realised that their plight was simply too incredible for outsiders to believe. Hence, as they beavered away on six feature films over a three year period, they were careful to tape their encounters with the ‘Dear Leader’.
As chilling as his strange fan-boy instructions are - “You came here looking for freedom,” he tells Shin - his words are less discombobulating than Shin’s own distressed, Stockholm Syndrome testimonies: “He completely adores me. There’s no way I can betray him.”
Shin died in 2006, so it falls to these recordings and Choi’s recollections to form the spine of Ross Adam and Robert Cannan’s account of one the movieverse’s most notorious true-life crimes. The small gaps in narration only serve to make the story more compelling.
