'a Kim Jong-il Production,’ By Paul Fischer

After the computer networks of Sony Pictures were hacked in November, possibly at the behest of a North Korean leader displeased with being defamed (and assassinated) in a Seth Rogen comedy called “The Interview,” comedians and politicians who thought themselves hilarious fell over one another spinning wisecracks about North Korean cinema. Running the gamut of genres — martial arts, musical, social-realist tragedy replete with graphic rape scenes — these movies were written, directed and co-produced primarily by just two people: a celebrated film couple from South Korea who were abducted in Hong Kong and spirited across the border under orders from North Korea’s kidnap-happy (and irrepressibly movie-mad) dictator, Kim Jong Il. Aided by a journalist’s ardor for his subject that practically yanks the reader along by the throat, along with the sort of timing that all of the book-publicity money in America (such as it is) couldn’t buy, Paul Fischer’s “A Kim Jong-Il Production” relates the too-bizarre-to-be-made-up saga of how North Korea’s late Supreme Leader (and father of current leader Kim Jong Un) made off with South Korean movie queen Choi Eun-Hee and her famed film director ex-husband, Shin Sang-Ok, with the express intent of bringing world-class panache to his country’s ramshackle films. Anyone who bemoans the cellar-level prioritizing of the arts in American public education and government budgets can’t help but feel a little wistful, if not perversely envious, that movies were so valued in North Korea by its ruthless communist dictator that he made film attendance compulsory and had his diplomats pirate domestic movies from their posted countries (along with drug money skimmed from cocaine sales to support Kim’s decadent lifestyle). The high-tech abductions of two film luminaries from enemy territory were but the brassiest hauls in a decades-long rein of kidnappings inaugurated by Kim after succeeding his father, Kim Il Sung, as Fischer so potently inventories in a poker-faced litany of international victims. A fallen industry player with an instinct for gaming the system, Shin attempted two failed escapes from Pyongyang, a disastrous miscalculation that resulted in his being incarcerated in a “torture position,” forced, under threat of beatings, to sit with legs folded and head bowed for 2½ years. Fischer hits his stride as he plumbs the dystopian, Lewis Carroll-meets-George-Orwell depths of North Korea’s hyper-paranoid society, a surreality show in which factory workers and upper-echelon politicos alike play out roles meticulously orchestrated by their Dear Leader, and even the most adored movie star can find herself drummed into making the ultimate exit: a public execution attended by thousands of her industry peers.