An Amazon Best of The Year Nonfiction Selection Library Journal Top Ten Book of the Year The Extraordinary True Story of Kim Jong-Il's kidnapping of the golden couple of South Korean Cinema, The Movies They Were Forced to Make, and Their Daring Escape.
Before becoming the world's most notorious dictator, Kim Jong-Il ran North Korea's Ministry for Propaganda and all its film studios.
Underwhelmed by the pool of talent available to him he took drastic steps, ordering the kidnap of Choi Eun-Hee (Madame Choi) - South Korea's most famous actress - and her ex-husband Shin Sang-Ok, the country's most famous filmmaker.
But as Madame Choi and Shin Shang-Ok begin to make North Korea's greatest films, they hatch a plan of escape worthy of a blockbuster Hollywood ending.
A Kim Jong-Il Production is that rarest of books: a wildly entertaining, cunningly told story that offers a rare glimpse into a nation still wrapped in mystery.
Gripping.
A Kim Jong-Il Production tells the absurd, harrowing, and true story of Choi and Shin's ordeal, which reveals the importance of film as propaganda to the North Korean regime.
--Esquire.
comThe 1978 abductions of the South Korean actress Choi-Eun-He and her ex-husband, the director Shin Sang-Ok, in Hong Kong is the true crime at the center of Paul Fischer's gripping and surprisingly timely new book.
--The New York TimesAn entertaining new book.
details how Shin and Choi] finally seized their chance to seek asylum.
A stupefying, novelistic read.
--The Boston Globe Fischer's entertaining narrative paints an arresting portrait of a North Korean theater state, forced to enact the demented script of a sociopathic tyrant.
--Publishers Weekly Paul Fischer's book A Kim Jong-Il Production is a highly illuminating deep dive on the middle Kim's cinematic obsessions and the film arms race between the two Koreas.
--The Washington PostExhaustively researched, highly engrossing chronicle of the outrageous abduction of a pair of well-known South K.
| Books | A wildly entertaining cunningly told story that offers a rare glimpse into a nation still wrapped in mystery |
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Flatiron Books A kim jong-il production: the extraordinary true story of a kidnapped filmmaker, his star actress, and a young dictator's rise to power, paperback/paul fischer
