A Kim Jong-Il Production

In 1978, Choi Eun-hee, South Korea's most famous actress disappeared on a business trip to Hong Kong. Her ex-husband, South Korea's most prolific movie director and producer, Shin Sang-Ok was a suspect. Shin's studio was failing, having lost it's film license after falling afoul of the South Korean dictatorship. Seeking to either clear his name and find his ex-wife or to pursue film opportunities abroad he travelled to Hong Kong and subsequently vanished.

Kim Jong-Il was a film buff, and also the favoured son of North Korean dictator Kim Il-Sung. He believed in the power of propaganda, and more importantly a shared ideology controlled by the state. He believed film was a powerful ideological tool. North Korean cinema was uninspired (literally, as film makers were not allowed to watch the films of other nations). Kim had set his eyes on two film makers from the South.

This book tells the story of the abduction and eventual escape of those two film makers and the eight years they spent in both reeducation camps and eventually on film sets.