Kim Jong-il, Choi Eun-hee, and Shin Sang-ok form a unique cinematic triumvirate in THE LOVERS AND THE DESPOT
THE LOVERS AND THE DESPOT (Rob Cannan & Ross Adam, 2016)
Lincoln Plaza Cinema, 1886 Broadway at 63rd St., 212-757-2280
Landmark Sunshine Cinema, 143 East Houston St. between First & Second Aves., 212-330-8182
Opens Friday, September 23
www.magpictures.com
In 1978, desperate to become an important international film producer, Kim Jong-il, son of North Korean supreme leader Kim Il-sung, kidnapped popular South Korean actress Choi Eun-hee and her ex-husband, director Shin Sang-ok. For the next several years, they made seventeen pictures together in totalitarian North Korea. Kim gave them complete artistic freedom while also manipulating them, trying to inject the films with propaganda that was favorable to North Korea while denigrating South Korea. “Let’s show the West what we are capable of,” Kim explains to Shin. This incredible story is told in the superb and exciting documentary The Lovers and the Despot, which plays out like a gripping thriller in the style of Argo, and it’s all true — although questions still abound all these years later. Together, Choi and Shin had made such award-winning films as A Flower in Hell, The Houseguest and My Mother, and Red Scarf. After their abduction, they experienced a kind of love-hate relationship with Kim, who became supreme leader in 1994. “I thought they were going to kill me,” Choi, now eighty-nine, says in the film. But she also notes, “It was one of the happiest times of my life.” The main controversy has always centered around whether Shin and Choi willingly became part of Kim’s propaganda machine or were merely just trying to stay alive, making the movies even as they plotted escape attempts. Shin and Choi secretly tape recorded hours of conversations between the two men, who appear to develop a real friendship. “In a way, we really hit it off. When he meets me, he leaves his guards outside. He completely adores me. There’s no way I can betray him,” Shin says on the tapes. But later he adds, “Whatever it takes I have to get out of here.”
In their first feature-length collaboration, directors Rob Cannan (Three Miles North of Molkom) and Ross Adam play amazing segments from the utterly fascinating tapes, which, as Shin notes, “ultimately . . . will be the only evidence.” They also speak with classified U.S. intelligence officer Michael Yi, U.S. State Department official David Straub, South Korean writer-director Lee Jang-ho, film critic Pierre Rissient, former Kim Jong-il court poet Jang Jin-sung, and Choi and Shin’s children, offering numerous perspectives of this remarkable tale. The film also features clips from such Shin projects as Homeless Wanderer and Runaway, archival home movies and photographs, and footage of North Korean propaganda films and carefully choreographed public gatherings. Composer Nathan Halpern, who has scored such other documentaries as Rich Hill, Hooligan Sparrow, and The Witness, keeps the mood tense and unnerving as Choi and Shin’s fate plays out. The Lovers and the Despot is an utterly captivating film about the love of movies and the immense power they hold over us, as well as a chilling look inside the mind of a brutal dictator.