A Kim Jong-Il Production: The Extraordinary True Story of a Kidnapped Filmmaker, His Star Actress, and a Young Dictator's Rise to Power
Paul Fischer, 2015
Flatiron
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250054265
Summary
Before becoming the world’s most notorious dictator, Kim Jong-Il ran North Korea’s Ministry for Propaganda and its film studios.
Conceiving every movie made, he acted as producer and screenwriter. Despite this control, he was underwhelmed by the available talent and took drastic steps, ordering the kidnapping of Choi Eun-Hee (Madam Choi)—South Korea’s most famous actress—and her ex-husband Shin Sang-Ok, the country’s most famous filmmaker.
Madam Choi vanished first. When Shin went to Hong Kong to investigate, he was attacked and woke up wrapped in plastic sheeting aboard a ship bound for North Korea. Madam Choi lived in isolated luxury, allowed only to attend the Dear Leader’s dinner parties. Shin, meanwhile, tried to escape, was sent to prison camp, and "re-educated." After four years he cracked, pledging loyalty.
Reunited with Choi at the first party he attends, it is announced that the couple will remarry and act as the Dear Leader’s film advisors. Together they made seven films, in the process gaining Kim Jong-Il’s trust. While pretending to research a film in Vienna, they flee to the U.S. embassy and are swept to safety.
A nonfiction thriller packed with tension, passion, and politics, author Paul Fischer's A Kim Jong-Il Production offers a rare glimpse into a secretive world, illuminating a fascinating chapter of North Korea’s history that helps explain how it became the hermetically sealed, intensely stage-managed country it remains today. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—France
• Raised—Saudi Arabia
• Education—Institut d’Etudes Politiques; University of Southern California; New York Film
Academy
• Currently—lives in London, England, and Toronto, Canada
Paul Fischer is a film producer who studied social sciences at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris and film at the University of Southern California and the New York Film Academy. Paul’s first feature film, the documentary Radioman, won the Grand Jury Prize at the Doc NYC film festival and was released to critical and commercial acclaim. A Kim Jong-Il Production is his first book. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
[The abduction of Shin and Choic] seems, from afar, to be this book’s main subject, but Mr. Fischer can’t tell it without providing a lot of other information. Fair enough. Kim Jong-il requires a lot of explaining. In fact, Kim’s part of the book is mostly more interesting than the filmmakers
Janet Maslin - New York Times
[T]here’s no shortage of detail.... Fischer is a fluent writer, clearly knowledgeable about film, and he has a dramatic story to tell. But we end up with a huge number of printed words concerning a case whose outlines remain familiar to many people. Although it’s fair to call the book a nonfiction thriller, I suspect many readers will put it down multiple times before managing to finish it.
Bradley K. Martin - Washington Post
An entertaining new book…details how [Shin and Choi] finally seized their chance to seek asylum…A stupefying, novelistic read.
Boston Globe
Gripping… A Kim Jong-Il Production tells the absurd, harrowing, and true story of Choi and Shin’s ordeal, which reveals the importance of film as propaganda to the North Korean regime.
Esquire.com
North Korea is a nightmarish movie theater without an exit in this gripping true-life thriller.... Fischer’s entertaining narrative paints an arresting portrait of a North Korean "theater state," forced to enact the demented script of a sociopathic tyrant.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) By examining the lives of...two extraordinary people, Fischer sheds light on politics, society, and culture in secretive North Korea. This enjoyable read is highly recommended for North Korea watchers as well as movie aficionados. —Joshua Wallace, Ranger Coll., TX
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Fischer matches keen cinematic analysis with an unusually cogent and vivid brief history of the two postwar Koreas. The most compelling facets of this book of astonishments are Fischer's insights into the relationships between Choi, Sun, and their diabolical captor... Gripping and revelatory, Fischer's true-life thriller provides a portal into the mad tyranny of North Korea.
Booklist
(Starred review.) Exhaustively researched, highly engossing chronicle of the outrageous abduction of a pair of well-known South Korean filmmakers by the nefarious network of North Korea's Kim Jong-Il. Filmmaker Fischer carefully presents a well-documented story of the kidnapping ... A meticulously detailed feat of rare footage inside the DPRK's propaganda machinery.
Kirkus Reviews
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