Hollywood and North Korea historically have had a somewhat antagonistic relationship – one needs only a vague recollection of the fiasco surrounding Seth Rogen and James Franco‘s controversial 2014 film The Interview for a relatively accurate frame of reference.
As it turns out, however, North Korea and Hollywood have more in common than meets the eye, namely, the basic premise of 1998 hit The Parent Trap – actress Lindsay Lohan‘s breakout role – and the 1978 abduction of South Korean film greats Shin Sang-ok and Choi Eun-hee.
Although the eight-year-long ordeal did happen in reality, it’s so unreal it seems like it could be an action-packed espionage thriller. Here’s everything you need to know about the kidnapping of Shin Sang-ok and Choi Eun-hee by North Korea’s second Supreme Leader Kim Jong-il.
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Who were Shin Sang-ok and Choi Eun-hee?
South Korean film producer and director Shin Sang-ok – also known as The Prince of South Korean Cinema – and South Korean actress Choi Eun-hee were married from 1954 to 1976, and again from 1983 until Shin’s death in 2006.
Shin was born Shin Tae-seo in 1926, in the then-Japanese occupied Seishin, which is actually the modern-day North Korean city Chŏngjin.
He worked prolifically during the ‘Golden Age’ of South Korean cinema in the late 1950s and 1960s, and over his lifetime, had more than 70 director and 100 producer credits to his name.
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Choi, meanwhile, was born in the then-Japanese occupied South Korean city of Gwangju in 1926, and began acting in the late 1940s.
After her breakout role in The Sun of Night (1948), alongside actresses Kim Ji-mee and Um Aing-ran, she became part of the ‘troika’ of Korean cinema and was considered one of the country’s most popular stars throughout the 1960s and 1970s, with more than 130 acting credits to her name.
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Shin and Choi founded the production company Shin Film after their wedding in 1954, and they worked on many movies together, including A Flower in Hell (1958) and The Houseguest and My Mother (1961).
Choi struggled with infertility, and the couple adopted two children together – Jeong-kyun and Myung-kim – before Choi filed for divorce in 1976, after learning Shin had fathered two children with another woman, Oh Su-mi, who was a young actress.
After the divorce, Choi’s acting career began to suffer. Similarly, Shin became less active in South Korean cinema as the government intervened and implemented strict censorship measures in the industry – his studio was forcefully closed down in 1978 by General Park Chung-hee as he flouted the government’s rules for film.
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The abduction of Choi Eun-hee
In January 1978, someone posing as a businessman offered to start a new film company – or performing academy in a school, the exact cover story is unclear – with Choi, who then travelled to Hong Kong to meet with him.
Choi was grabbed, sedated and abducted from Repulse Bay in Hong Kong on the order of Kim Jong-il, the son of then Supreme Leader Kim Il-sung, and subsequently taken to North Korea.
After her arrival at North Korea’s Nampo Harbour eight days later on January 22, 1978, Choi was taken to ‘Building Number 1,’ a luxury villa where she was to reside.
The actress was given a tour of Pyongyang, which included various landmarks, museums, and Kim il-sung’s birthplace. Choi was also provided with private tutoring sessions about the Supreme Leader’s life and achievements.
Kim Jong-il would spend a lot of time with Choi, and reportedly, when he asked her opinion on films, he respected her answers. They often went to parties, operas, musicals and movies together.
Five years after her capture, Choi was informed that she had been abducted as part of a plan to bait her ex-husband into coming to North Korea.
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The abduction of Shin Sang-ok
After Choi’s disappearance in January 1978, Shin became a person of interest in the case.
Accounts of his reasons for travelling to Hong Kong vary – romantics say that although the former couple had been divorced for almost two years and Shin had another family at that time, he decided to travel to Hong Kong to search for Choi, whom he was still close with.
Others cite that Shin, after the license for Shin Studios was revoked by the South Korean government, decided to travel the world looking for one of his films to be greenlit in an effort to secure a resident visa.
Nevertheless, six months after Choi’s capture, Shin was in Hong Kong, where one of his friends, who was working for North Korea, betrayed him and helped facilitate his kidnapping.
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Shin Sang-ok and Choi Eun-hee’s time in North Korea
Initially, Shin arguably was not as indulged by Kim Jong-il as Choi was – he was given lavish accommodations, like Choi, however, he attempted to escape twice, and was consequently detained at a concentration camp for disobedience.
In February 1983, after either two or four years in detention, he was notified that his release would be imminent.
Once Shin’s North Korean ideology re-education was completed to a satisfactory level, he was reunited with his ex-wife at a party hosted by Kim Jong-il in Pyongyang on March 7, 1983. Prior to this party, neither Shin nor Choi knew the other had been kidnapped and taken to North Korea.
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After their reunion, the duo were put to work.
Shin and Choi were shown Kim Jong-il’s personal library of films – reportedly containing more than 15,000 movies from across the globe, a majority from the communist bloc though some from Hollywood – and told to watch four films a day and critique them.
Shin and Choi were also remarried on Kim Jong-il’s recommendation, and Choi converted to Roman Catholicism.
Both Shin and Choi reportedly showed respect for Kim Jong-il’s cinematic perspective and the breadth of his knowledge, and after a while, the future Supreme Leader told them of his master plan: he wanted Shin to direct a film that would be entered into an international film contest.
Shin began his work on October 20, 1983, from his office at Pyongyang’s Choson Film Studios.
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Kim Jong-il knew that, due to the fact the films contained themes aligned with North Korean internal propaganda, it may not appeal to a broad audience, so he gave Shin permission to choose themes and subject material that would be appealing to an international audience.
The duo made six films in total together: An Emissary of No Return (1984) – a portion of which was shot in the former Czechoslovakia using European actors, a first for North Korean cinema – Love, Love, My Love (1984), Runaway (1984), Salt (1985) – for which Choi won best actress at the Moscow Film Festival – The Tale of Shim Chong (1985) and Pulgasari (1985) – the most expensive of their films, influenced heavily by the Godzilla films.
At a press conference in Yugoslavia in April 1984, Shin and Choi said they were voluntarily in North Korea, after Kim Jong-il advised them to do so.
According to The Guardian, Choi said that Kim Jong-il “fully supported” the couple and “respected [them] as artists,” though she never forgave him for kidnapping her.
Choi also said, according to the publication, that the duo were permitted to make “films with artistic values, instead of just propaganda films extolling the regime” but longed for their freedom the entire time.
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The great escape
Eight years after their abductions, Shin and Choi escaped captivity while they were at a film festival in Vienna, which they had attended on Kim Jong-il’s request to scout for financing for an upcoming biographical film on Genghis Khan.
Although publicly, they had said they were in North Korea by their own choice – and North Korean authorities denied kidnapping accusations – the duo had secretly recorded their conversations with Kim Jong-il in order to have proof that they were kidnapped against their will should they need to defend themselves.
In these recordings, a conversation was documented where Kim Jong-il had admitted to his kidnapping plot, and explained his reasoning – it was a bid to upgrade North Korea’s film industry and change the world’s perception of the Workers’ Party of Korea.
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Shin and Choi checked into the InterContinental Vienna hotel on March 12, 1986, under the pretense of an interview with Akira Enoki, a journalist.
The duo convinced their North Korean bodyguards to leave the room, and requested for an employee to notify the embassy of the United States that they were both seeking political asylum.
At 12.30pm, Shin, Choi and Enoki got into a taxi and sped towards the U.S. embassy as their North Korean bodyguards pursued through traffic. They eventually got out of the car and sprinted to the embassy, successfully getting there relatively unscathed.
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Life after North Korea
Kim Jong-il was convinced that Shin and Choi were kidnapped by the Americans, and the duo covertly lived in Reston, Virginia for two years under the protection of American authorities.
Shin and Choi moved to Los Angeles shortly after, where Shin worked under the pseudonym Simon Sheen in the 1990s as a film director and executive producer.
Throughout their lives in America, North Korea maintained that Shin and Choi voluntarily defected from South Korea and continuously denied any kidnapping claims. North Korea also accused Shin and Choi of embezzling a large sum of money that was intended to fund the Genghis Khan project.
The couple returned to South Korea either in 1994 or 1999, although Shin was reluctant to do so – he thought the South Korean security police would not believe that they had been kidnapped.
Shin continued to work on films in South Korea, and was invited to be a jury member at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival. He died in 2006 after complications from hepatitis, and was posthumously awarded South Korea’s top honour for artists, the Gold Crown Cultural Medal, by President Roh Moo-hyun.
On April 16, 2018, Choi passed away in hospital the morning she was due to have kidney dialysis. Four years prior to her death, she had been awarded an Order of Cultural Merit at the Korean Popular Culture and Arts Awards.