Documentary The Lovers and the Despot Plays Like Fiction

South Korean actress Choi Eun-hee is lured to Hong Kong to talk about a film role, but while playing with her female greeter's young daughter on the waterfront, Choi is called over to a dock, where she is pulled onto a speedboat and whisked onto a cargo ship bound for North Korea.

Cut to Choi's ex-husband, “The Prince of Korean Cinema” Shin Sang-ok, soon arriving in North Korea under mysterious circumstances. It reads like the plot to a very thrilling—and very fictional—popcorn movie, but this really happened in the late 1970s, as shown in the compelling new documentary The Lovers and the Despot.

Whether the late Shin, as he claimed, was actually abducted or willingly waltzed into North Korea has been in dispute. This has not: Kim Jong-il brought the couple back together because he loved global cinema, hated his country's own movies and wanted them to help elevate North Korean filmmaking to world-class status. While fulfilling their captor's dream, Choi and Shin became lovers again.

Presented mostly in Korean with English subtitles, British writer/directors Ross Adam and Robert Cannan's film begins with Choi, who is now pushing 90, recalling her happy days as a glamorous movie star in South Korea. She appeared in her first film in 1947 and went on to star in many of Shin's productions before they married and adopted two children.

However, their reign as South Korea cinema's “It” couple hit the skids. Shin was a talented filmmaker but a terrible businessman, and Shin Studio collapsed because of mismanagement. Meanwhile, the Choi-Shin marriage crumbled thanks to the director's affair with a younger actress. The couple eventually divorced.

With her time as a leading lady ticking down, Choi went to Hong Kong to hear a proposal to recapture her stardom. She had no idea and could not have imagined what she was walking into.

Shin swore he was looking for Choi when Kim's goons kidnapped him. But doubts about his story, his published comments that North Korea's dictator gave him the expensive tools and artistic freedom he'd been denied in South Korea, and the couple's happy demeanor in photographs and on film in the Communist country hung a cloud of suspicion over them. Even their children wondered if their parents had willingly abandoned them.

While the kidnapping-for-cinema angle is gripping at its core, the mysteries about how it all really went down add more layers to The Lovers and the Despot. Also helping the documentarians are the tons and tons of archival footage and movie reels that were available to them. Cameras were always present to capture Choi acting, Shin directing, and the couple appearing on red carpets or at awards ceremonies before and after they wound up in North Korea. Their disappearances from South Korea were covered internationally by news shows, and they would later appear in Kim's propaganda films.

Editor Jim Hession (Kobe Bryant's Muse) deserves credit for expertly splicing in all that material with newer on-camera talking-head interviews to keep the tension of Adam and Cannan's story high. Now we call on Bong Joon-ho to use the documentary as a jumping-off point for another of his excellent crime thrillers. Perhaps Bong could arrange to have Kim Jong-un kidnapped and shipped to South Korea to play his dad.

The Lovers and the Despot was written and directed by Ross Adam and Robert Cannan. Now available on demand via cable and satellite services and streaming on iTunes, Amazon Video and other platforms. No big-screen showings have been booked in Orange County yet, so check and recheck www.magpictures.com to see if a local theater is added.

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