It's 1985 and the Democratic People's
Republic of Korea is preparing to debut its greatest cinematic achievement. it's a monster movie called Pulgasari and it's the product
of a virtually unlimited production budget. Like nearly all North Korean films before
it Pulgasari is presented as a tribute to the working people of a bygone era who found
themselves at the mercy of an invading oppressor, until their cries are answered by the
sudden arrival of a mystical savior. Little is known about the country that
produced it, the so-called hermit kingdom. Culturally isolated with a
strict adherence to nationalism, outsiders can only speculate about what goes
on inside. But in many ways Pulgasari is meant to change that. It's North Korea's
attempt at an international blockbuster and an effort to establish itself as a
country with valuable artistic contribution. And with an economy on the verge of bankruptcy
and dwindling options for exports, the country's in desperate need of a win. But just as in the
movie, a great sacrifice must be made to bring Pulgasari into existence, and there were only
two filmmakers in the world who could make it. Lured into the country, ripped
away from their children, forced to lie and humiliate
themselves on an international stage, given a complete ideological realignment,
and ordered to create a masterpiece... it took the ruination of two human lives to give
Pulgasari to the People's Republic of Korea, but to quote the film itself, "as long as
Pulgasari is with us our victory is assured." Pulgasari consumes everything the small farming
village needs to survive, from their tools to their blood, in order to grow strong enough to
protect them. And for a country on the brink of famine, with a staunch military-first economic
policy, the metaphor wasn't lost on its audience. But Pulgasari's director was an outsider,
what some would even call the enemy. He was a prolific South Korean filmmaker named
Shin Sang-ok, once the pride of his country but now a source of national shame. The movie would be
seen as a betrayal to the country where he'd begun his career, but for Shin Pulgasari was little more
than a diversion meant to facilitate an escape. Only two years before Pulgasari began filming,
Shin was in a North Korean prison serving a sentence of ambiguous length. The only crime
he'd committed was attempting to return home. Shin had been in North Korea since 1978 but he hadn't come willingly. He had been abducted while in Hong Kong where he had been searching for his ex-wife, the South Korean actress Choi Eun-hee. Choi had gone missing earlier that year. News
reports in the west suggested that she traveled to Hong Kong for a film but then she'd vanished
with her luggage untouched in her hotel room. Choi had one of the most
recognizable faces in South Korea. She was the beautiful Chunyang, locked away for
rejecting the advances of the village governor. She was the grieving widow of a fallen air force
pilot. She was the legendary Madame White Snake who defied the gods by disguising her true
form in order to live on earth as a mortal. Throughout her career, Shin was
usually the one behind the camera, directing his wife in more than 30 films. They
were melodramatic even by 1950s standards. Most films feature at least one instance of
Choi literally collapsing under the weight of her own emotions, often accompanied by
someone trying to shake some sense into her. But their movies had a certain intimacy, always
prying into their character's inner lives, and their production company, Shin Films,
helped set the stage for what the South Korean film industry would ultimately become, with
Choi as the undeniable face of the company. Choi's disappearance was a matter of national
emergency but the authorities had, quote, "no clues in her disappearance," and if
Choi had decided to leave everything in order to restart her life then it would
have meant she'd abandoned her children. Shin and Choi were both in their 50s and they
hadn't made a film together in six years. Shin had even started another family following their
divorce. But in 1978, Shin found himself in Hong Kong, retracing the steps of his ex-wife, and it
was there he was lured to the beaches of Repulse Bay on the promise of obtaining a counterfeit
visa in order to remain in the country. "As soon as the car door shut," Shin later
recalled, "someone put a sack over my head, then they sprayed something inside the
sack and I started to lose consciousness." He didn't know it at the time but Choi had
been abducted in nearly identical fashion. And in the span of six months, two of the most
famous figures of South Korean cinema had been kidnapped and taken aboard a boat headed toward
North Korea's capital, the city of Pyongyang. Shin was no stranger to the region. He'd been
born in the north about 20 years before the peninsula was divided. But in 1978 the city he
arrived in was unrecognizable. The image of the country's leader was everywhere: on murals,
billboards, statues, the people's clothing. A 150-foot Pegasus monument at the city center
served as a constant reminder to dash forward at a hurried but deliberate pace toward the
national goal of economic and cultural isolation. Each morning, anthems were broadcast from
loudspeakers to wake its citizens and steel them for the toils ahead. In every home and in
every schoolhouse hung the watchful portraits of the two Kims, the father and son of the
nation, the latter of which, Shin and Choi would come to know intimately. As the propaganda
minister an heir apparent to the nation itself, Kim Jong-Il was the authority on all things
art, but cinema was his true calling. And since he and his father didn't recognize the
sovereignty of South Korea, any resource they had that might serve the Democratic People's
Republic, the Kims felt entitled to take. Shin and Choi were as famous as anyone could
be in their home country, but in this place no one had heard of them. They'd been brought
here to earn their celebrity all over again. Choi had already been in the country for
six months by the time Shin arrived, although they wouldn't see each other for
years. Their abductions mirrored one another but with one notable difference: Kim Jong-Il
escorted Choi into the country personally. Like her ex-husband, this wasn't her first time
in North Korea. During the Korean War, she worked as a, quote, "army entertainer" performing
for soldiers in both the north and the south, a subject she and Shin explored in one of
their early films titled A Flower In Hell. But her second time in the north, Kim brought her
to a villa referred to as Building Number One. Inside were doors that didn't lock, clothes
that were mysteriously tailored to fit her. Outside there was a garden where she could
occupy herself to stave off the boredom. Guards not only watched
but coached her every move, and for the first several years, her only
obligation was to become North Korean. She studied the writings and ideologies of
the country's leader. She wrote letters to Kim Jong-Il, thanking him for her new life. "Light
of our people, our teacher, our dear comrade Kim Jong-Il," Choi wrote. "I would like to express
my deepest gratitude and thanks. I would also like to wish you good health for the next year. I
thank you for taking me into your confidence and helping me to see the new light." Occasionally,
she was brought to the Pyongyang festivals in order to celebrate the two Kims existence
along with the rest of the workers party. For years, no one would tell
her why she'd been taken, but Kim assured her that all would make
sense quote "once Director Shin arrived." Just outside Choi's compound were prison
camps the size of metropolitan cities. She didn't know it at the time but inside
one of them her ex-husband was being kept. Shin had started out in a compound much like Choi,
but he hadn't taken to his ideological retraining well. He'd attempted to escape twice: once by
stealing a car and again by opening a vent and hiding inside the walls. His second attempt
would cost him what little freedom he had. Shin could safely assume that his celebrity had something to do with his abduction, but beyond that he could only guess. When he could find his strength shin hunger struck.
Out of desperation, he wrote letters to Kim Jong-Il pledging his skills to the North Korean
film industry as a condition of his release. To distract himself he directed movies in his mind.
And in March of 1983, Kim brought Choi to a party after more than five years in
North Korea she would finally find out why she was here. international festivals and award ceremonies
since their cinematic debut in 1949. Shin finally located his missing ex-wife,
and despite the fact that they've been divorced for eight years, Kim Jong-Il
not only declared them remarried but appointed the two of them as official
advisors of the North Korean film industry. The North Korean film industry needed some
help. Their films had been routinely ignored by Foreign critics wouldn't acknowledge them.
Foreign theaters wouldn't screen them. Even its own people had to be forced
into the theater to watch them. As the new industry leaders, Shin and Choi's first
responsibility was to figure out where things were going wrong. Foremost, the films were overly predictable. Villains were either the imperialist Japanese who'd lorded over the Korean people during their
pre-world war 2 occupation, or the Americans who'd terrorized them during the Korean War. The
reluctant hero who was either shown on screen or merely hinted at in dewey-eyed monologues,
was the North Korean president Kim il-Sung who'd appear in the final minutes of
the film not only to liberate his people but to bring about a worker's paradise that would
dazzle the world. "Even if we only saw the first half of a movie, we already knew the whole story,"
one North Korean defector said in an interview. "The main character went through many hardships and was
always saved at the end through Kim il-Sung's love." When the formula did work, such as in
1971's The Flower Girl, a tear-jerker about a tragedy befallen family struggling
to survive in a Japanese-occupied Korea only to be saved in the end by
Kim Il-Sung's band of revolutionaries it became such a point of cultural
importance that it made it on their currency. But on the global stage, Flower Girl was outshined
at every turn by films like the Godfather Solaris and The Way of the Dragon the very
same year. Shin and Choi meant it when they said they would help. Spending their days making
films was an unequivocal improvement from the alternative, but Shin was already planning his next
escape, and this time Choi was coming with him. As the months passed they became closer to the
Kims, meeting regularly with Jong-Il specifically to strategize the country's new approach to
filmmaking. And in August of 1983, Choi had an idea Choi put the tape recorder in her handbag and
made sure it was turned on for the meeting The recording they made of Kim
Jong-Il is the only time he's ever been captured in candid conversation,
and he's surprisingly confessional. He acknowledged their inhumane treatment
although he blamed it on his subordinates. But the only subject Kim could stay on for long
was the film industry. The DPRK was desperate for a strong industry of some kind to emerge.
Many of their factories and farmlands had been decimated by the Korean War and what little
natural resources that hadn't been bled dry by the Japanese weren't enough to sustain the
economy. The Kims' idea of a utopia was an autarky a completely closed, self-sufficient society that
was envied and admired by the rest of the world. They referred to this goal as juche, but they
were nowhere close to achieving it. In order to even feed themselves they'd accumulated
billions in foreign debt from the Soviet Union which they had neither the intention nor
ability to repay. A thriving film industry would be a welcome start but according to Kim, his
actors and directors were simply too incompetent. Kim's father blamed the Korean people overall. The
DPRK simply had, quote, "a shortage of intellectuals." But the Kims wouldn't acknowledge how their own
isolation might stifle creativity. Kim Jong-Il wanted North Korean films to be as exciting and
popular as western films, but he wouldn't even let his filmmakers watch western films. Instead,
Kim would watch the films himself, absorbing them reverse engineering them, and then he would
instruct his filmmakers how to mimic them via a guidebook he called On the Art of the Cinema. Despite being canonized as a work of unprecedented genius, On the Art of the Cinema is
full of unhelpful observations too obvious to even state. "In creative work, one must aim high," Jong-Il
writes, and, "the actor is the face of the film." The only film references in the book are to pass North
Korean films or the occasionally approved Soviet film. Western films are strictly forbidden. Quote.
"There is nothing for the working class to adopt from the old art and literature which cater to the
taste and sentiments of the exploiting classes," Kim wrote. Even those who were responsible for writing
Korean subtitles for western movies for Kim's personal viewing were prevented from experiencing
the full story. "There were no visuals," one of the translators reported, "and they would chop up the
tapes into pieces giving us a few minutes at a time so we really were just translating a string
of words rather than anything that made sense." Kim wanted brilliant and profitable cinema
created in a complete cultural vacuum and he couldn't understand why it wouldn't happen.
But with Shin and Choi, things would be different Kim now had proven filmmakers he could
defer to, but in order to get the most of them he knew he'd have to give them
something he rarely gave anyone: trust. By 1984, it was time for Shin and Choi to start
making movies. They began with the dubiously historic film titled The Emissary of No Return.
It chronicles a lone Korean diplomat, traveling to the 1907 Hague convention to demand his
country's freedom from Japanese annexation. When he fails he commits harakiri
right in front of the world's leaders. Kim wanted Shin and Choi's debut to be
special. He even permitted them to film abroad as long as the countries were DPRK-friendly. The
opening shots of Emissary, filmed in east Berlin where North Korean audiences first real glimpse
of the outside world. After Emissary, Shin and Choi decided to remake an old movie of theirs that
they'd never been satisfied with. They knew their current audience wouldn't have seen the original,
so they could reuse as many ideas that worked as they wanted, as well as improving where needed. The
original was called Sung Chunyang, but they titled this version Love, Love, My Love, and it was surprisingly
risque for North Korea. Characters showing romantic feelings for anything other than their own
country was considered bad storytelling practices But Kim was willing to give Shin and Choi a
long leash if it meant more successful films. But what the North Korean people really needed was
escapism, so Shin and Choi told them the story of Hong Kil-Dong, an outcast who's raced to greatness
by an old monk who still got it, and uses his flute to not only bring comfort, but punishment,
to none other than the invading Japanese The pace of their output was fast:
seven films in just two years not only directing and acting but
working with other filmmakers in order to ensure the industry-wide change
that Kim wanted to see across the nation Many North Korean filmmakers struggled under the
self-taught insights of Kim Jong-Il. Reports from defectors who worked in the industry stated that
they would film scenes in the order that they appeared in the script rather than by location.
Film sets were often interrupted by micromanaging visits from Kim, and according to the book North
Korean Cinema: a History, any item that he touched from a zoom lens to a chair would be removed
from the set and placed in the Kim Jong-Il Museum Quote, "Film directors saw some of their best
equipment gone after a visit by the leader. Once he touched it, it became a holy artifact." But on Shin
and Choi's film sets, they had complete authority. They introduced opening on-screen credits,
something Kim had surely seen while watching foreign films but hadn't made the connection
that it might incentivize better work from his filmmakers. Choi spent as much time behind
the cameras in front of it, and she had the rare opportunity to mentor actors who considered her
every word the ultimate authority on the craft. She'd not acted in a film for years but she'd
been acting daily around Kim, her character being a dutiful North Korean, wholly focused on the mission
at hand. And in 1985, Choi brought North Korea its first international award, a best actress prize
from the Moscow film festival for their movie Salt. From Kim's perspective, the plan was working
wonderfully, and Choi allowed herself to bask in the success as well. In the past, Kim had been so afraid that
his audience would miss a film's message that screenings were often followed
by an ideological review session despite the fact that the
rhetoric was impossible to miss. Shin and Choi had a much better sense of how to embed. 20 years earlier they made a film in South
Korea called Rice, about a man who rallies a small starving village to dig a tunnel through
a mountain in order to irrigate their farmland. It's a film that's been cited as an
advertisement for President Park's policies of agricultural modernization, but
at no point does it feel like propaganda. While in South Korea, Shin, Choi, and President
Park had shared a fairly symbiotic relationship. After Shin Films had released Evergreen in 1961 President Park approached
them to express his admiration But by the their mid-1970s, their relationship soured. Shin Films had
been repeatedly fined for breaching President Park's increasingly stringent censorship
laws, which Shin attributed to the studio's ultimate bankruptcy. In their halcyon days,
Shin Films produced nearly 10 films per year In the two years prior to Shin and Choi's
abduction, the studio hadn't released anything But in North Korea, Shin Films had been resurrected.
Shin and Choi were simultaneously prisoners of the state and experiencing more creative freedom
than they'd ever had in their entire careers. When they needed to blow up a train for their
film Runaway, Jong-Il shipped them a railcar loaded with dynamite. When they needed
hundreds of extras to film a battle scene Kim gave them the Korean People's Army. North
Korean audiences had never seen anything like it Kim Jong-Il had actually given
his people something of value They had no idea their new filmmakers had
been taken away from their children to be here They only knew that they were here to amaze Shin and Choi hadn't resumed their marriage willingly but
their relationship found its old rhythms In South Korea they'd become celebrities together, owing their success to each other, and in the
north they were reliving it all over again. As their movies came out, people in South
Korea assumed that it was because of their falling out with President Park,
Shin Films had simply relocated for better opportunities. These suspicions were confirmed when Kim
insisted Shin give a press conference stating that they'd come to North Korea
voluntarily. Kim coached him on what to say. And in 1984, in a hotel conference room full of
international media, Shin sold the lie. "My wife and I were absolutely not kidnapped," Shin told
the reporters. "Kim Jong-Il offered to sponsor us without political oppression, to make movies
for the purpose of national reunification." When asked why the two of them
had been silent for so long Shin said it was due to, quote, "intimidation
from the south." Their fans in South Korea hadn't heard from the two of them in five years,
and now they seem to be enjoying renewed success under the regime that held the constant threat of
invasion over them. Shin and Choi were helpless to correct the record but that wouldn't be the
case forever. It was almost time to go home. With the film industry in Shin and Choi's hands,
nationwide tastes were beginning to modernize and other areas of North Korean entertainment,
such as television, struggled to keep up. Their flagship show had been a four-part mini-series
called Star of Korea, a biography about the eternal leader Kim il-Sung and his youth spent forming the
quasi-fictional Korean People's Revolutionary Army The production didn't lack any effort. Its
lead actor is even rumored to have been given plastic surgery in order to perfect the
resemblance, but Kim didn't think too highly of it. North Korean audiences had had enough of this
story as well. To quote one defector, "After the Shin Sang-ok era, we had new eyes. We could judge
which movies were interesting and which were not." But North Korean television did have one standout
series: the international spy tingler Nameless Heroes. Nameless Heroes had a rare selling point
in North Korean entertainment--for the first time in DPRK history, viewers got to see American actors.
Western characters in the past had been played by either Soviets or, more commonly, Koreans and wigs
in face paint. But here were four real Americans acting out their own stereotypes on film. Like
Shin and Choi, they weren't performing voluntarily They'd been American soldiers who'd surrender to
North Korean forces in the 1960s while they'd been patrolling the demilitarized zone that formed
following the Korean War. But instead of being sent back to the United States as part of a
prisoner exchange, as they'd expected, they were kept in the country indefinitely and eventually
given starring roles on TV playing evil Americans. Their names were Larry Abshier, Jerry
Parrish, Charles Jenkins, and James Dresnok. But on screen they were CIA agent Captain Carl;
Lieutenant Lewis of the British Army; Dr. Kelton a warmonger whose only interest is generating
profit for American arms manufacturers, and the most piggish American of them all, Arthur Cockstud, a
ruthless lieutenant colonel and black market mogul. Their characters would occasionally refer to
America as "the federal states" as if that were a nickname the showrunners thought the country might
have for itself. All four actors have been no older than 25 when they defected and almost immediately
after they were taken into custody, Pyongyang radio stations began to broadcast quotes from the
soldiers who were happily adjusting to their new lives. "I have seen with my own eyes the happy life
of the North Korean people," one transmission read. "I came across everywhere people without want." Another
described their new life as quote "a Shangri-La where I can enjoy happiness." To the parents back
home, it was obvious that their sons were speaking under duress as they'd never spoken like this
in their lives, but to the US authorities all four men were traitors who could expect a swift
indictment if they should ever find their way home. As new arrivals in North Korea, they had a lifetime
of ideological training to catch up on, and they would spend 10 or more hours a day memorizing
the writings of Kim il-Sung. "If we didn't memorize enough or were not able to recite portions of
our studies on demand," Charles Jenkins would later write, "we were forced to study 16 hours a day on
Sunday, which was usually our only day of rest." At first they didn't understand the language. "I would
have to memorize passages phonetically," Jenkins wrote, "memorizing everything by sound rather
than meaning." Many passages were never forgotten. North Korean cinema in the 1980s was
becoming something truly unique to watch. Cast, crew - it was impossible to know who was
performing under the threat of torture and who wasn't. This wasn't only happening in the film
industry. Translators, artists, teachers, cultural advisors... any skill gap the country had, the Kims
believed the simplest solution was to abduct whomever they needed from neighboring countries,
rather than cultivate the talent at home. In many cases captives were paired
together, forced to marry and start a family. Charles Jenkins was wed to a Japanese nurse
named Hitomi Soga, who'd been snatched off the street in 1978 and made to teach Japanese
to Korean spies. They had two children together. James Dresnok was wed to Doina Bumbea, a painter
from Romania, who'd been lured to Pyongyang in 1978 under the false promise of a job as an art gallery
curator. They also had two children together. Having a family kept the captives compliant, as they knew
that any betrayal would result in their children being punished. And a public statement, either
coerced or forged, testifying that they were living there happily was typically all it took
for the captives home country to disown them. Shin and Choi had met many of these fellow captives
during their time in the DPRK, but they were by far the Kim's biggest trophies. As the success of the
film industry grew, so did Kim's trust. He wanted Shin and Choi to spend more time abroad, not only
to sell the lie that they were working for the DPRK willingly, but to finally give North Korean
cinema the international promotion it never had. As Shin and Choi became the face of the DPRK's
international film campaign their window of escape began to open, but it
wouldn't be easy. They were always watched, and before they would find the opportunity,
they would need to make one final film. The only people who knew that Pulgasari would
be Shin and Choi's final film in North Korea were Shin and Choi. They were past the brink of
exhaustion when they began filming in early 1985, but they couldn't rest just yet. Kim
had ordered them to film the most bombastic spectacle they'd ever made, and it's
difficult to imagine a more drastic departure from the character-driven melodrama
that the two of them were known for. Pulgasari fits into their filmography like
a clenched fist into a glove. We can only speculate how Shin and Choi might have approached
such a film under normal working conditions. But after having been in captivity for eight
years, their minds were preoccupied with escape. Film plots in the DPRK were typically credited to
president Kim Il-sung, who's said to have written much of the North Korean canon during his time as
a revolutionary fighter in the Korean mountains. Even Shin Films productions, like Emissary of
No Return, are said to have been adapted from the work of the eternal leader. But the story of
Pulgasari needed to be different... It needed to resonate across the globe. Kim had wanted to do a
kaiju film for decades, and he made no secret of his inspiration. Japan's Godzilla had the type of
global success he was looking to emulate, and with any merchandising opportunities that might result,
the profits would belong to the state itself, rather than some private film company. Godzilla's
success was largely due to how well it captured the nation's collective sense of existential fear
following World War II's nuclear bombings. In order to replicate its success, the symbolism would have
to be tailored to North Korea. So in Pulgasari, we follow a medieval farming village with a choice
to make. The village has valuable iron in the form of farming tools. A nearby military faction intends
to requisition this iron to reforge into weaponry, despite the fact that it would leave the
farmers without a source of livelihood. The farmers can give up their iron or they
can part with it on their own terms. They begin feeding their iron to a little dragon who
was sculpted by an imprisoned village blacksmith while on hunger strike. Conditions similar
to Shin's first several years in the country. The dragon is brought to life by a drop of blood and immediately begins eating anything
metallic, from sewing needles to door locks. The more it eats, the bigger it gets. And as it
grows, so does its disdain for imperialism. The various green screen effects give a bewildering
sense of scale to the full-grown monster, always on the foggy outskirts of the
battlefield, with the fabric of its costume bunching as it marches forward. Nothing
works against it, even futuristic technology. At the seed level, the film's message was
perfectly North Korean. If we pull our resources, if we make sacrifices for self-sufficiency,
nothing can threaten us. This was Juche. Despite North Korean cinema being overwhelmingly
anti-Japanese, Kim flew in portions of the crew who worked on 1984's Return of Godzilla, including
the Japanese actor who played Godzilla himself, to suit up once again. The actor had to be
deceived into thinking the movie was being filmed in China in order to agree to the project,
only to find out the truth once he arrived in Pyongyang. But to Kim, there was nothing that
wasn't justified to make Pulgasari a success. The country was still nearly a decade away from
The Arduous March, a four-year-long famine that would spread across the nation following the
collapse of the Soviet Union. But the writing was already on the wall, and if Kim's plan of economic
and cultural redemption through cinema was to work, he had to go all in. But toward the end of the
film the message of Pulgasari begins to muddy. After the battles are won and the imperialists
driven out, Pulgasari still needs to eat--farming tools, pots and pans for cooking, the monster
consumes it all indiscriminately, despite the villager's pleas to stop. The film becomes abstract in its final shots. The
farmer's daughter tricks Pulgasari into eating her by hiding inside a large iron bell. Pulgasari
takes the bell, scrunches it up, and swallows it. Pulgasari starts gearing up for an explosion and
the actor inside the suit ensures it's a proper Shakespearean death. Abruptly,
Pulgasari turns to stone and shatters. From the rubble, a baby Pulgasari emerges. Its
awkward infant legs carry it up the mountain where it seems to hail a ride on a transporter, floats
into the farmer's daughter, she cries, roll credits. Domestically, the movie performed well. "It was
too crowded in the theater," one defector said. I tried and went there but I didn't succeed.
It was so crowded, so popular." Surprisingly South Korea chose to screen it, the first
time they'd ever shown in North Korean film But Shin and Choi's home country was incurious. In
Seoul, a city of nine and a half million, Pulgasari sold only a few hundred tickets in its opening
week, and the foreign critics from which Kim had been so eager for acknowledgement were calling
it inept. But Kim believed the world at large would see Pulgasari as he did: the masterpiece of
a lifetime. And now it was time for the big push. Kim's prized filmmakers were entering politically
neutral Austria, a place with an American embassy, in order to set up the European branch of Shin
Films, something they'd convinced him was of the utmost importance to their goal of international
reach. It was a gamble. Shin, after all, had already attempted escape twice. But the two of them were
thriving in the DPRK, and Kim knew that they'd never experienced under President Park the type
of filmmaking carte blanche he gave them. Park had destroyed their careers; Kim gave them back.
Shin and Choi's security detail normally kept a close eye on their every move, but it was Shin's idea
that they back off a bit in order to help sell the narrative that they had free will. And as they
checked into the intercontinental hotel in Vienna, the breathing room from the guards gave Shin the
opportunity to hand a note to the concierge. "We are Shin and Choi, husband and wife," the note
said. "We want to take refuge in the U.S. embassy." Once everyone had settled into their rooms, it was
time for the two filmmakers to make their move. Once outside, they slid into a
taxi that had been called for them, with the immediate goal of
creating distance from the hotel. But even on the road in a
country unfriendly to the DPRK they knew they weren't safe yet. Their North
Korean guards, who feared the punishment that would result in their dereliction of
duty, wouldn't let them get away easily. Shin knew all too well what would happen if they
were caught. The prison camps had only grown crueler since he'd last been inside, and this
time he would be bringing his wife along. They had no idea what would happen to them once
they were free, or how they'd be received by their home country who viewed every film as a betrayal,
but it had never been the plan to stay, and as the taxi pulled up the steps of the American
embassy, the only thing left to do was run. But as soon as they got to the embassy
doors, Choi felt something behind her After Shin elbowed his way to
safety, Choi entered directly after and they found that the embassy
had been waiting for them. In his anger, Kim Jong-Il removed Shin and
Choi's name from the credits of all the movies they'd made, then he outright banned them
all together. They'd already been conceptualizing their next masterpiece, a Genghis Khan epic--a
real movie about the khan, not that garbage that came out of America in the 50s. Kim had been
particularly excited about that one but now it would never happen. The official story was
that the two filmmakers were not only traitors but thieves. North Korean defectors have
disclosed what they were told about their escape. "We had regularly scheduled lectures
for the workers at their workplaces," a defector called Miss A said. "They told us that Shin ran away with a huge amount of government money." Kim had opened an international bank account for
Shin and Choi while they were working abroad They had free reign to draw from it,
and the night before they escaped they emptied it. Shin and Choi escaped
North Korea with around 2 million. In comparison to what they'd contributed and what
they'd been put through to accomplish it, the money was nowhere near compensation, but it was as close
as they could hope to get. Throughout their nearly 40-year career, the two of them had revolutionized
an entire country's film industry, had become both adored by the population and trophies of the
state, and then committed an act of betrayal so deep that they might never be able to return. And
they'd done this twice, in two warring countries. By late 1986, Shin and Choi settled into America. The CIA provided
them with a safe house in Virginia, and after eight years in the DPRK, they were finally reunited with
their children. They thought often about going home but South Korea had changed since they'd last been
there. President Park had been assassinated in 1979 while Shin was in prison and Choi was undergoing
her re-education in Building Number One, and the new regime was cold and suspicious of their return.
"We are not comfortable with the Korean authorities," Shin said in an interview. "Shortly after we
had sought refuge in the American embassy the Seoul government said it would leniently
embrace us back to Korea. Leniency for what?" Finally free to tell their story, they
were eager to get in front of a microphone but their version of events
was often met with skepticism. But they'd been anticipating this
treatment for years and it's the reason why they risk their lives in order to
record their conversations with Kim Jong-Il. In 2002, after being confronted by Japanese
prime minister Koizumi, Kim Jong-Il admitted to abducting Japanese citizens. His excuses
were similar to what he told Shin and Choi. It was all due to miscommunication between he
and his subordinates but those responsible had been punished, etc. Kim attempted to continue the
mission. He even granted his current filmmakers many of the same freedoms he'd given Shin
and Choi, like filming internationally, but ideologically storytelling reverted to
its default, with protagonists delivering end-of-movie monologues crediting all their
personal accomplishments to the president. "There wasn't anything interesting in those movies,"
one defector wrote. "They didn't reflect our daily lives. They were not realistic movies. We didn't
like them." People instead took to pirating movies and tv shows from South Korea, giving the DPRK a
VHS black market industry that rivaled the real movie industry. In one of Kim's final attempts
to ignite the industry, he founded his own film festival. He gave it the catchy title of the
Pyongyang International Film Festival of the Non-Aligned and Other Developing Countries. It was
rare for countries other than Russia, China, or the DPRK itself to walk away with any awards, but even
among the eastern bloc it was considered a low- prestige event. It's impossible to know if Kim ever
truly abandoned his plan of national fulfillment through cinema, but at some point he must have
acknowledged that he just didn't know how to do it. Worse yet, he would spend the last decade of his
life watching South Korea begin to achieve that very goal, and had Kim lived a decade longer it
would have only gotten worse. "And the Oscar goes to... Parasite." "So the hit Korean series Squid Game has
now become the biggest series launch for Netflix ever." The American defectors from Nameless Heroes
would continue to appear on North Korean film and television screens. The evil American was
a cherished stereotype that they never seemed to grow tired of. James Dresnok, Larry Abshier,
and Jerry parish would all die in North Korea. Charles Jenkins, however, would
eventually find his way home. As promised, even after nearly 40 years,
Jenkins faced a court-martial for desertion, but was ultimately allowed to relocate to Japan to
live out the remainder of his life with Hitomi and their children. Shin and Choi would never experience
better filmmaking opportunities than they had in North Korea, but that wouldn't stop them from
trying. They fought for the ability to continue their careers, but when they finally returned
to South Korea, it was far from a warm welcome. In 1990, they made a film which many
viewed as an attempt to re-establish their loyalty to South Korea. It was called
Mayumi: Virgin Terrorist, and it dramatized the true story of the North Korean
bombing of South Korean air flight 858 The South Korean government loved it, but
Shin and Choi were reminded that they weren't in the DPRK anymore when it drew
heavy criticism for being propagandistic and the families of the victims of the bombing
called it tactless and sued them for defamation. In an attempt to give Shin Films its final
resurrection, Shin and Choi moved to Hollywood California. Their goal was to make a movie
about their whole North Korean experience, which many agreed would make a fantastic film, but
a movie with an all-Asian cast proved too tough a sell for American producers. Shin
adopted an American pseudonym, Simon Sheen, and they've found occasional glimpses of
success with the franchise Three Ninjas, a whimsical mix of Hong kil-Dong and Home
Alone. Its success allowed Shin to produce several sequels, even directing some of the later
entries. But the steady stream of success the two of them had experienced in their prime of South
Korea, and later in the north, seemed to elude them in Hollywood, and as they got older, it seemed
unlikely that they would ever experience it again. In the late 90s, Shin attempted to recapture some
of their past glory by producing an American remake of Pulgasari. He called this one Galgameth, and it's basically the same movie: medieval setting, a little doll that
comes to life after absorbing a few drops of bodily fluid, eats metal until
it grows into a huge destructive monster... but it made nowhere near the splash the
original movie had made, and despite being produced a full decade later, much of the CGI
looked even worse than it had in Pulgasari. Shin and Choi stayed together for the rest of their lives.
They remained eager to give interviews, often wearing their trademark oversized sunglasses as
they recounted their story. When asked about Kim Jong-Il, Shin and Choi were quick to offer
up a rather pessimistic view of humanity. In 2006, Shin passed away at the age of
79. Choi died 12 years later at age 92. The two of them left behind a body of work that
spans across cultures and ideologies, with their films representing something different to
each country, and despite the eight years Kim had stolen from them, they seemed to be able
to recognize that the time wasn't totally lost. Dams and dust flow into this forbidden city, Towering flames and concrete hulks, Tales of wars and great struggles take me in, I need you, Don't be scared, I'll follow you, Where speakers hang overhead, They play our song across the city
