North Korea's Love-Hate of Movies

It sounds like the plot of an outlandish Hollywood caper. A high-ranking minister of an isolated and secretive regime kidnaps a beautiful movie star and a famous director and whisks them across the sea to his country, where they are held captive and forced to produce propaganda films.

The 1978 abductions of South Korean actress Choi Eun-hee and her ex-husband, director Shin Sang-ok, in Hong Kong is the true crime at the center of Paul Fischer's gripping and surprisingly timely new book. The mastermind behind the plot was Kim Jong Il, a movie buff who led North Korea's Ministry for Propaganda and Film and later became the country's Supreme Leader. (Choi and Shin escaped in 1986.)

This bizarre chapter of North Korean history is recounted in Fischer's coming book, "A Kim Jong-il Production," which Flatiron Books is to publish in February. Though it takes place more than 30 years ago, the story sheds light on the recent blowup surrounding the Sony film "The Interview," the raunchy comedy starring Seth Rogen and James Franco that satirizes Kim Jong Il's son, Kim Jong Un, the current leader. In a country with no free expression and a tightly controlled state-run media, movies, which have long been used as a potent propaganda tool to prop up the regime, can be a matter of life or death.

North Korea's Foreign Ministry called the release of "The Interview" a "blatant act of terrorism and war," and threatened to retaliate. Cybercriminals who have been tied to North Korea by the FBI hacked into Sony's system and released sensitive emails, scripts and financial information.

After anonymous threats were made against theater chains, Sony released the movie in a few hundred theaters on Christmas Day and made it available online, where it was streamed more than 2 million times in its first four days.

"For the Kim regime, there must have been a fear that a film like 'The Interview' could very well end up on the black market in North Korea," said Fischer, who watched the film online with his family over the holidays. "It's an actor playing their leader, which is almost blasphemy in itself, but then it's worse, because they're playing him for laughs. It would be very worrying to be made to seem stupid and ridiculous. That breaks a huge taboo."

In "The Interview," Kim Jong Un is depicted as a short, fat, insecure blowhard who loves margaritas and Katy Perry's pop tunes, but also as a megalomaniacal dictator who poses a real threat to his people and the rest of the world.

"It felt like a missed opportunity," Fischer said. "They picked up the stuff you could get about Kim Jong Un with a quick Google and made a thin portrait of a guy who's insecure and is trying to live up to his dad."

When jokes worked, it was mostly "because of how ridiculous the North Korean regime is, rather than how biting the satire in 'The Interview' is," Fischer said. "I watched it with my family, and none of them felt like they understood the country any better," he added.

North Korea is a long-running punch line in U.S. pop culture. The 2004 comedy "Team America: World Police," created by writers for "South Park," depicts Kim Jong Il as an alien cockroach. The comedian Margaret Cho received an Emmy nomination for her portrayal of the dictator on the NBC comedy "30 Rock." Kim Jong Un, with his chubby baby face and his fondness for cheese and basketball, has become an easy target on "Saturday Night Live," "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" and "The Colbert Report."

"North Korea embodies all the stereotypes of imagery from the Cold War, but in an absurd way, so we can poke fun at it in a way that we couldn't poke fun at the Soviet Union or Communist China," said Charles Armstrong, a Columbia University professor who specializes in Korean history. "We don't take North Korea seriously enough."

For those still baffled over how a lowbrow comedy could set off such a strange chain of events, Fischer's book offers insights into why the North Korean leaders take film so seriously. In the course of his research, Fischer, a filmmaker who grew up in Paris and now lives in London and Toronto, watched around 40 North Korean films, including Kim Jong Il's productions "Sea of Blood" and "Flower Girl."

Fischer spent a week in North Korea as a tourist and visited the country's film studios, which scaled back their productions during the economic crisis and famine in the 1990s. Though the country has continued to produce films, even gaining international attention with movies like "The Schoolgirl's Diary," the focus has shifted to less expensive productions like documentaries and animated films, Fischer said.

The North Korean government has used movies to shape the population's perception of their leadership as godlike and benevolent, while foreigners, particularly the Japanese and Americans, have been portrayed as murderous threats. Under Kim Jong Il's leadership, the country's film studios released hundreds of movies, Fischer said.

Movies were so important to Kim Jong Il that he ordered the kidnappings of the South Korean actress and director so that they could upgrade the nation's film industry. In these nationalistic spectacles, the Supreme Leader was often spoken of but never shown, with the exception of one hagiographic biopic. (The actor who played Kim Il Sung, the country's founder, was given plastic surgery to resemble the leader, then sent to a concentration camp when the role ended, Fischer said.) Going to the movies was mandatory for citizens. In villages without movie theaters, films were shown in factories and party offices, and viewers had to attend discussion sessions with party leaders afterward.

The government was able to control the films its citizens saw for decades, but its grip on entertainment has slipped. Possession of unapproved films is a crime punishable by death. Still, citizens risk their lives to access black market DVDs and Hollywood movies smuggled in on USB drives.

It's perhaps not surprising the North Korean officials seemed to panic over a movie that paints their leader in a ridiculous light.

"If you're sensitive about being seen as a god and an almighty ruler, there's a lot in 'The Interview' that you wouldn't take too kindly," Fischer said. "All the sex stuff, the stoner stuff, all of that would feel pretty threatening to them. And then killing him at the end, of course."

The fallout from the film could continue. Some film critics and foreign policy experts argue that "The Interview" goes beyond farce and poses a real challenge to the country's political elite. "The Interview" itself posits that merely broadcasting an interview with Kim Jong Un in which he comes across as fallible and weak would be enough to topple the leadership. Some human rights groups argue that the movie, if it gets into the hands of citizens, could overturn the regime's narrative and plant the seeds of rebellion. Some human rights organizations are reportedly planning to drop DVDs of "The Interview" into North Korea with balloons. Experts are divided over the impact it could have if it reaches citizens.

"I seriously doubt that it will have a positive effect on North Korea if it were dropped in," Armstrong said. "God help us if America's chief propaganda tool in North Korea is a crude and profane Seth Rogen buddy comedy."