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)
