Books: A plot you couldn't make up

Kim Jong-il (left). Picture / AP

Best-selling author Emily St John Mandel’s troupe follow their instincts to preserve art when all else is lost, writes Stephen Jewell

From all the hoo-ha over The Interview - a lowbrow farce lampooning Kim Jong-un, which led to the extraordinary cyber-attack on Sony Pictures - you might derive the casual impression that North Korea's notoriously repressive ruling body is anti-cinema.

Think again. Kim's father, the late Kim Jong-il, left behind a collection of more than 20,000 VHS tapes, DVDs and laser discs, mostly of Western films. He loved the James Bond films, Rambo and Friday The 13th. After succeeding his own father, Kim Il-sung, to the leadership in 1994, he even took to screening In The Line Of Fire (1993) for his personal bodyguards as a sort of instruction tape, exhorting them to do as Clint would if any assassin hoved into view.

In September 1967, aged 26, Kim Jong-il was appointed cultural arts director of the Propaganda and Agitation Department. This brought the country's cinema production into his direct purview.

One of his first achievements was to produce a three-hour-long film adaptation of the opera Sea Of Blood, about the Japanese occupation of Korea in the 1930s. Bloody, sentimental, and expressly designed to inculcate the state-imposed values of Juche ("self-reliance"), this was his very own Gone With The Wind, and whipped up the populace into fresh excitement about the medium.

Two of Kim's closest collaborators, the South Korean director Shin Sang-ok and his wife, the sought-after leading lady Choi Eun-hee, had at best mixed views about the future dictator. "Talented but not quite talented enough, powerful, jealous, insecure and boastful; with an overinflated sense of [his] own importance in the world, a short temper, and an obsessive need to micromanage ... Kim was, they thought, the archetypal film producer."

How he procured this pair's services is more remarkable than the plots of all their film collaborations put together. In the mid-70s, Shin and Choi had divorced and their professional standing in South Korea was moribund. In 1978, they were separately invited to Hong Kong for industry meetings, grabbed by bewigged henchman and bundled unceremoniously on to waiting motorboats.

For the next five years, they were captives of the North Korean state, kept apart and with no knowledge of what had happened to each other. Choi spent her time being transferred back and forth between a series of villas, and invited as Kim's guest to many of his opulent dinner parties, Casino Royale-like gambling sessions and drunken balls.

Shin had a worse time. After an escape attempt in December 1978 - one of the most exciting passages in Paul Fischer's account - he was spotted, dragged off a train at Shinonchon station, and taken to a gulag, two hours outside Pyongyang. Here he was cooped up inside a filthy cell barely large enough to lie down in, never allowed to wash, and fed on a meagre diet of corn, beans and rice.

This was his life for four years. Shin's avoidance of a summary execution was for one reason alone: Kim had plans. On March 6, 1983 - their wedding anniversary - Kim engineered the reunion of the divorced couple at a Government banquet. They were astonished, not only to see each other, but tobe allowed to leave together afterwards.

Thoughts quickly turned to escape, but with their constant fear of surveillance, this was easier said than done. Instead, they consented to Kim's grand scheme, which was to revive the flagging fortunes of North Korean film production with a series of blockbusters.

Some - Emissary Of No Return, Runaway - were typical nationalist melodramas. One was a light romance with the title Love, Love, My Love. Then there was Salt (1985), a globally praised social-realist tragedy for which Choi won the Best Actress award at the Moscow Film Festival.

All were domestic hits beyond Kim's dreams - even the most notorious of the lot.

Pulgasari (1985) - is a ludicrous, expensive-yet-cheap-looking Godzilla rip-off which has found favour among midnight-movie audiences in the West. It's about a small dragon figurine, carved by an oppressed blacksmith in medieval Korea, which comes to life, grows enormous and stomps around with a hilarious social conscience, siding with the feudal poor against an evil governor.

Shin and Choi finally slipped Kim's clutches on a trip to Vienna, by making a run for the US embassy. Shin's subsequent career in America is a sad footnote to this bizarre tale, marked mainly by his stewardship of the shoddy and forgotten 3 Ninjas franchise. He died in 2006, but Choi still lives in Seoul, where Fischer met her.

Unfolding at almost needlessly breakneck pace - there are 33 cliffhanger-fond chapters - the book proves a virtual truism, which is that there's barely anything you could make up about the Kim dynasty's propaganda efforts that wouldn't seem scarily plausible.