A Kim Jong-Il Production

by Paul Fischer

  “I had her hide in the house of a friend in West Germany,” Shin lied, embarrassed. It made no sense and he knew it. With every question the story unraveled a tiny bit more. Neither Shin nor Choi could explain why they had not been seen publicly in five years if they really had been working freely in Eastern Europe since 1978, or why Shin had kicked up such a fuss about Choi’s disappearance before his own if, as they were saying now, Shin knew where she had been the whole time. It also struck many in the room as unusual that Kim Il-Sung, a man usually so hungry for good publicity, would have kept such high-profile defectors—a real propaganda coup—a secret for so long.

  Shin did his best to field several more questions about why it had taken so long for them to go public and what their plans for the future were. Then, hoping it would lend him credibility, he told the journalists that he could be reached at the Shin Film head office in Hungary, street address Roosevelt Ter 2, Budapest, on the banks of the Danube. What he didn’t say was that that was the address of the Hyatt Hotel in Budapest, where Mr. Kang had only just booked room 602 and had it hastily disguised into a believable temporary production office to deceive any particularly nosy newsmen. The “office” telephone number Shin read out to the journalists was for the Hyatt’s front desk.

  Before returning to Pyongyang, Shin called the Dear Leader to make sure he was happy with his public performance. Kim Jong-Il sounded satisfied. He instructed Shin to move forward with plans to find a more permanent office in Eastern Europe. So Shin Sang-Ok, who was a gambler and shrewd enough to know that sometimes the moment of greatest risk is the perfect time to act, launched into action.

  “The world will be watching our next move with even more interest than usual,” Shin told his young captor. “Now is the time to really drive the point home if we want to convince them. What if, instead of Budapest, we opened our Shin Film office in neutral Vienna?”

  Kim Jong-Il agreed.

  27

  Same Bed, Different Dreams

  When Emissary of No Return was released to the general North Korean public, it was a gigantic hit. The North Korean people had never seen anything like it, and for everyone aged thirty-nine or under, who had been born after the 1945 division, the opening shots of The Hague were literally their very first glimpse of the world outside. Shin’s film, like all previous North Korean films, was used as propaganda, with screenings compulsory and followed by group talks in which audiences were encouraged to reflect on what the main characters’ climactic suicide taught them about the level of devotion expected of them, the ordinary North Korean people. But it marked a turning point in North Korean culture: the very first time that even the citizens with the lowest songbun were able to see, however subtly, that the world outside the Workers’ Paradise was not the hell Kim Il-Sung told them it was.

  Emboldened by its reception, Kim Jong-Il submitted the movie to the Karlovy Vary Film Festival in Czechoslovakia, a leading festival in the Communist bloc, where The Flower Girl had also played twelve years earlier, the last time a North Korean film had been accepted to any international festival. Shin and Choi were sent to the July 1984 screening, where at first attendance was underwhelming. “While other countries advertised their films enthusiastically, we didn’t have any publicity posters,” Shin said. “When our film was screened only a handful of people turned out to see it.” With a captive domestic audience of fifteen million people, who could be sent to a prison camp for missing the opening day of a new film, it seemed it hadn’t crossed the Dear Leader’s mind that he would have to market his new work abroad to gain an audience. Looking on as audiences queued for the Western movies—that year Peter Fonda and Italian actress Monica Vitti were the star guests of the festival—Shin felt “alone and without much support.”

  And then, to everyone’s surprise, the festival’s jury awarded Emissary of No Return a special Best Director award, which, due to the wording of the film’s end credits, they gave to Choi. As she stepped up to the stage to accept the crystal trophy she was overcome with joy. After years of isolation and loneliness, locked away in a villa with round-the-clock guards, the world had acknowledged her, even if in this small way. In the audience Shin stood up and held up his camera, like a proud father at a school play, photographing Choi as she shook hands with the head of the jury. He felt enormous pride that he had, on the first try, achieved one of Kim Jong-Il’s goals. He pictured the Dear Leader’s face. This has to win us Kim Jong-Il’s complete confidence and trust, he thought.

  Sure enough, shortly after they returned to their room, with their North Korean minders just on the other side of the wall, the phone rang. “Our country has never won an honor like this, Teacher Choi,” Jong-Il told Choi when she answered. He sounded ecstatic. He repeated his approval for them to open an office in Vienna and his promises to let them spend more and more time in Europe: in Budapest, Prague, Vienna—and the United Kingdom. Emissary of No Return would be playing at the London Film Festival in November.

  * * *

  There is an old expression in Asia, “same bed, different dreams,” representing the relationship of a married couple whose lives are intertwined but who do not communicate and who, in spite of sleeping side by side every night, are each living completely different lives. Those were the words Shin had in mind as he and Choi traveled to London that fall. “While Kim Jong-Il intended to use me as a means of propaganda,” he wrote, “I intended to use the opportunity to escape.

  “There was no doubt that London was the best place to attempt an escape to freedom,” he added. But if he had hoped to have some freedom of movement, Shin was wrong. Choe Ik-Gyu left for London first, with a group of fourteen bodyguards and “delegates,” who would be making arrangements and preparations for Shin and Choi’s arrival.

  The South Koreans left a week later, via Budapest and Vienna, with a larger entourage than they had ever had—one supervised by Im Ho-Gun, the Deputy Director of the secret police, and that included one of the long-haired young men who had kidnapped Shin in Repulse Bay. When he met Shin again, Shin said, “the young man just looked at me and smiled.”

  Shin and Choi landed in London at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, November 28, 1984. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had just survived the Brighton hotel bombing, briefly knocking out of the headlines a controversial national miners’ strike—two events which, back in North Korea, the Korean Central News Agency had made much of to portray Britain as a land of inequality and turmoil. The film festival’s highlights were Joe Dante’s Gremlins, the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple, and Roland Joffe’s The Killing Fields. Shin and Choi’s film would be showing out of competition.

  The North Korean delegation caused a minor sensation. The Home Office had long refused their visas, only finally granting them a day before the scheduled screening. Helen Loveridge, the hospitality manager and assistant to the program director at the festival, was told to expect twenty-nine North Korean guests, but in the end forty turned up, which may have partly explained the delay with visas. Choe Ik-Gyu had given the festival a list of names, “but it was fairly useless,” Loveridge said, since most of the names were fake. Once in London the entire delegation stayed at the same hotel and traveled to screenings on a private hired coach, initially causing havoc by being unable to understand the seat rows and numbers on the tickets they had requested for screenings, thereby holding up the start of the showings, to much displeasure from the other guests and critics. On one occasion Choe Ik-Gyu was caught by news crews hectoring Asian students queuing for a film outside the National Film Theatre, shouting loudly: “In North Korea you can study for free! In North Korea there are no starving people! People eat well and live well, thanks be to the Great Leader!”

  For Shin and Choi, the forty-six-hour trip was agonizing. They were in the free world but surrounded, around the clock, by armed “bodyguards,” employed by Kim Jong-Il not to protect them but to confine them. The National Film Theatre, on the South Bank, was bordered by bright cultural landmarks: the National Theatre an
d the Royal Festival Hall. There were cabarets and clubs just over the Thames in the West End, and punks in leather jackets and brightly colored mohawks in next-door Brixton, a melting pot of races and nationalities that, a year after Shin and Choi’s visit, would see its second major riot in five years, both sparked by police attacks on black Britons. There were strikes and protests and, by the time Shin and Choi arrived, twinkling Christmas decorations hung across Regent Street and the hordes of shoppers rushing in and out of Selfridges, Liberty, and Hamleys. The daily newspapers printed what they wanted, each disagreeing with the others, beholden only to the law and their circulation figures. For all the mess, noise, and violence—maybe even because of it—Shin and Choi longed more than ever to be part of this world where such chaos was allowed. It seemed to them the polar opposite of Kim Il-Sung’s sterile, inhuman theater-state. Freedom was all around them, but they could not partake in it.

  A small group of South Koreans picketed the screening of The Emissary of No Return, shouting “Good-bye!” at Shin and Choi as they entered and left, their Communist minders pushing them into the waiting bus as quickly as possible. The following morning at 5 a.m. one of the bodyguards woke Shin and Choi and insisted they pack and leave immediately, since “the North Koreans had intercepted a message sent from the South Korean embassy in London to Seoul and the situation had taken a bad turn.” In truth the Home Office had issued them visas valid for the day only. In the dark, damp early morning Shin and Choi were hustled to Heathrow, loaded onto a plane, and flown back to Budapest. Before arriving in London both had been given new gold watches by Choe in order to impress their Western hosts. Now that they were on the plane back to North Korea, Choe ordered them to hand the watches back.

  28

  A Full Shooting Schedule

  “My dear Eun-Hee,” the August 1984 letter began, “You must be well and healthy no matter what. Let’s have a wonderful ending to our lives together.…” Shin’s characters were scribbled and rushed, in black ink on coarse brown paper. The letter had been sent from Pyongyang to Choi Eun-Hee’s hospital room in Budapest. Lying in bed, recovering from surgery, Choi smiled.

  She and Shin had become full partners in the North Korean incarnation of Shin Film, so that now, for instance, three months before the London fiasco, Shin was finishing a film in Pyongyang while she had already begun preparations on their next picture. Suddenly, however, Choi was struck by a painful attack of gallstones. Juche was well and good, but Kim Jong-Il did not trust his star actress to Pyongyang hospitals, so he had arranged to have Choi flown to Hungary for an operation. Shin rarely wrote letters, and this one, even though it was short and quickly moved on from inquiries about Choi’s health to discuss the films currently being produced, made Choi’s heart warm with joy.

  The next day Choi left the hospital and was moved to her hotel room, to rest a few days before being brought back to North Korea. It was here that Shin found her. Missing her terribly, he had jumped on a plane from Pyongyang at the first opportunity. She looked “very pale,” Shin remembered, and “upon seeing me she rejoiced as if she were seeing Christ himself.” Shortly after he arrived, Choi looked at him and said, shyly, “Darling, why don’t we celebrate our wedding here? We’ve been husband and wife for thirty years, but we have only ever registered our marriage—we never did have a proper wedding ceremony.”

  She was right, they hadn’t. Kim Jong-Il’s announcement that they were remarrying had not been followed up: in North Korea, the Dear Leader’s announcement was law, no ceremony needed.

  Shin looked at his wife and smiled. “Darling, let’s do it. That sounds good.” He kissed her.

  In Eastern Europe their North Korean guards occasionally relaxed their watch, so that Shin and Choi were even allowed to go out by themselves from time to time. After all, where could they escape to? Their passports were withheld and they were still on Communist ground. So the couple told their watchers that they were going out to shop for a couple of hours and went into town, past the old Turkish baths and the Magyar palaces, and bought two simple wedding bands. The next morning, August 26, they slipped out of their room before their minders had woken up, jumped in a taxi, and asked to be taken to church. The streets were dark and quiet, the air cool before dawn, the summer heat still at bay. The taxi driver took them up a hill of old crooked streets to the Matyas Templom, one of Budapest’s large, gothic Roman Catholic churches, in the Castle District by the river. The sun was just rising over the Danube, pink light twinkling on the water and spouting in shafts between the medieval houses. The last of the Hapsburg kings, Charles IV of Hungary, had been crowned here in 1916.

  As Shin and Choi got out of the taxi, the bells at the top of the cathedral’s stone tower struck six. They passed through the huge arched doorway and found a small gathering already lined up at the pews and the morning service just beginning. They stood in the back during the mass, the first Choi had ever attended, the first chance she had had since Catherine Hong had baptized her in fallen leaves two years before. They listened to the priest, to the prayers and sermons in the beautiful, unusual language. Finally, many minutes later during communion, they joined the line and walked up to the old father and asked him, in broken English, to pray for them. He nodded and offered them a prayer in a soft voice before moving his hand over them in blessing. Without saying anything more Shin took out the rings. He put a ring on his wife’s finger and she one on his, their eyes locked. With that done, their wedding ceremony, thirty years after the fact, was accomplished. They walked back down the nave, out into the early-morning sunlight, and down the cathedral’s front steps, their hands together. Later, packing in the hotel room, Choi’s eyes lingered on her husband’s letter.

  “Let’s have a wonderful ending to our lives together…”

  * * *

  They returned to Pyongyang, and to thoughts of escape.

  Their interactions with the Dear Leader now took place mostly over the phone, in purposeful, irregular conversations always initiated by Jong-Il, who called the hotline reserved for him at either the villa or their office. One of them, which Shin tape-recorded in the summer of 1984, went as follows:

  “Hello,” Shin said as he picked up.

  “I’m so sorry,” Jong-Il said, without explanation.

  “It’s me,” Shin answered. “Thank you for calling me.”

  “That’s all right. Visiting socialist countries is obviously easy for us. But capitalist or neutral countries … those are the countries we have to think of going to visit. If you only visit socialist countries it will look like your travel is being controlled. We don’t want to give that impression. You should be ready to introduce your name to Europe. There is a South Korean security police presence in those countries, but we’ll be fine if we move you around in a group. You can go anywhere you want—if the South Korean guys see that, it’ll hurt them, to see you enjoying true freedom.”

  “Yes, that’s a good idea,” Shin said hopefully.

  “Yes, it is,” Kim said. “Interviews with Western journalists aren’t enough, also. We can be more aggressive. You and Choi are setting up your film studio and you’ve settled down. Even if you have a different plan for life than mine, you might still enjoy the life here. Oh, by the way, Yun I-Sang [the expatriate South Korean pianist, whom Kim had tried, unsuccessfully, to kidnap] is here again,” Kim lied. “Would you be interested in meeting him?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “You two can meet then. You might have to tell him the same thing, that you are very happy in North Korea and so on.”

  “Yes, I know. I’m aware that a lot of people are as naïve as I used to be,” Shin said, playing the transformed man.

  Kim laughed. “So, you might say to Yun that you belong in the country, and that we might go to West Germany, say, to work on films if needed—of course, this is something we’ll need to sort legally on this end.”

  “Yes, you’re right. It will make sense because my nationality is here,” Shin said. “I’m
so impressed with you, and I adore you.”

  “Good, good,” Kim said, and hung up.

  * * *

  In 1984, acknowledging that the North Korean economy could no longer drive itself forward, Kim Jong-Il relaxed investment rules slightly and passed a new Joint Venture Law that encouraged select companies to seek financing and coproduction from abroad. The law had failed to attract any investors other than ethnic Koreans living in Japan, who were lobbied by the Chosen Soren, but Jong-Il was convinced films, especially those made by Shin, would become a commodity he could export and profit from. Such commodities were rare in the DPRK, which could offer for export only some minerals, mainly zinc and coal, and in later years nuclear weapons. Shin Sang-Ok and Choi Eun-Hee’s first trip to set up a European base in Vienna was approved by Kim in July 1984.

  To Kim Jong-Il, the trip to Vienna was the next step in gaining prestige for North Korea. To Shin and Choi, Vienna was the perfect escape route—if only they could both make it there. In the case of that first journey, Choi would not be allowed to travel farther than Budapest, leaving Shin to go on to Vienna alone. If he did escape, he would be leaving her behind. (The same rule had long applied to North Koreans who traveled abroad on government business: they were required to have a family, so that if they defected, they left behind a wife and kids as hostages.)

  In Vienna, “three or four” North Korean staff were with Shin every waking hour. They took the room next to his at the Intercontinental Hotel and confiscated his passport, as always, once he had cleared immigration. His first day in Vienna, Shin set up a bank account—ironically, at the Bank of America—for Kim Jong-Il to deposit funds into; they had agreed that once Shin managed to open the office, his $3 million yearly budget would be kept in Vienna. Shin opened the account in the name of Shin Film, using the registered address of one of the employees of the North Korean embassy, with a first deposit of $10,000 in cash. When the teller asked him whether more than one signature would be requested on the account, Shin shook his head and dashed off only his name on the application. He would be the sole person authorized to make payments and withdrawals without any outside countersignature.