Kim Jong-Il Production: The Extraordinary True Story of a Kidnapped Filmmaker, His Star Actress, and a Young Dictator's Rise to Power

• Flatiron Books

An Amazon Best of The Year Nonfiction Selection Library Journal Top Ten Book of the Year! The Extraordinary True Story of Kim Jong-Il's kidnapping of the golden couple of South Korean Cinema, The Movies They Were Forced to Make, and Their Daring Escape. Before becoming the world's most notorious dictator, Kim Jong-Il ran North Korea's Ministry for Propaganda and all its film studios. Underwhelmed by the pool of talent available to him he took drastic steps, ordering the kidnap of Choi Eun-Hee (Madame Choi) - South Korea's most famous actress - and her ex-husband Shin Sang-Ok, the country's most famous filmmaker. But as Madame Choi and Shin Shang-Ok begin to make North Korea's greatest films, they hatch a plan of escape worthy of a blockbuster Hollywood ending. A Kim Jong-Il Production is that rarest of books: a wildly entertaining, cunningly told story that offers a rare glimpse into a nation still wrapped in mystery. "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 "The 1978 abductions of the South Korean actress Choi-Eun-He and her ex-husband, the 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 New York Times "An entertaining new book...details how [Shin and Choi] finally seized their chance to seek asylum...A stupefying, novelistic read." --The Boston Globe "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 "Paul Fischer's book A Kim Jong-Il Production is a highly illuminating deep dive on the middle Kim's cinematic obsessions and the film arms race between the two Koreas." --The Washington Post "Exhaustively researched, highly engrossing 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."--Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)