The Lovers and The Despot offers peek into North Korea

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      A documentary by Ross Adam and Robert Cannan. In English and Korean, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable

      “There are no love stories in North Korea.” So says Choi Eun-hee, a 1960s glamour star and filmmaker who became famous twice, for reasons that boggle the mind, even by Pyongyang’s standards.

      Choi became part of a bizarre Cold War spy saga when she was kidnapped from South Korea in 1978, after being lured to Hong Kong by a movie offer when her career was faltering. Partially, that decline was because she had divorced Shin Sang-ok, one of the South’s leading directors—although his poor money skills saw him faltering by then as well. Eventually, he would also be kidnapped, and be much more roughly treated, before the couple was reunited in Pyongyang.

      This was at the whim of Kim Jong-il, the movie-loving son of North Korea’s dynastic founder, Kim Il-sung. Dear Leader rightly concluded that his own national film industry produced nothing but “the same plot over and over again”, in his words. (Choi was able to surreptitiously record the enigmatically coiffed strongman, who was rarely heard in the West.) But Kim couldn’t see why his repressive regimentation made it impossible to be creative. He therefore simply “imported” two culture workers and alternately seduced and threatened them into being his own personal Hollywood.

      The result was an amazingly productive period, with the power couple—finally free from fundraising chores—producing 17 movies in less than three years. It’s too bad Despot directors Robert Cannan and Ross Adam didn’t, or couldn’t, obtain more of this astonishing output, as the snippets we glimpse—alongside other Korean clips, talking-head interviews, and grainy re-creations—don’t convey as much subtext as we might like. It would also help to know how this hothouse revival affected their relationship, at least until their daring escape, some years later.

      “In intense situations,” explains Shin at one point, “people imitate what they’ve seen in movies.” In some cases, life is infinitely weirder.

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