When the father of current North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, Kim Jong-il, decided to upgrade his country’s film industry, he decided to recruit the best. But rather than place an ad in the trade papers or invite prospects for a lunch meeting, he chose to kidnap them instead. Kim began by luring South Korea’s most famous actress, Choi Eun-hee, to Hong Kong where North Korean agents grabbed her. Her husband, South Korea’s premier director, Shin Sang-ok, met the same fate when he went looking for her in Hong Kong after she went missing.
Their captivity is part of the story told in The Invitation-Only Zone: The True Story of North Korea’s Abduction Project. Author Robert S. Boynton is concerned with the broader pattern of the North Korean program, which involved kidnapping many other foreigners, primarily Japanese but also South Koreans and even Lebanese and Romanians. Most victims were obscure Japanese citizens seized at night along lonely beaches and hustled onto boats waiting offshore. It sounds like a farfetched episode from a Cold War television spy show—with the captives rescued before the end of the hour by Robert Culp and Bill Cosby. Sadly, it’s a true story and the captives languished for years.
The motivation behind most of the kidnappings remains inscrutable. In the case of Choi and Shin, however, the agenda was clear. The prisoners were feted like stars and forced to make seven movies while in captivity. Turns out Kim was a film buff, who in the age before the VCR much less video on demand amassed a collection of 20,000 foreign films stored in a climate controlled warehouse. Kim wanted to see his country’s movies on the international film festival circuit. “North Korea would press the cause of world communism by getting films into Cannes,” Boynton writes.
Small errors slipped into The Invitation-Only Zone, including the assertion that Japan was bombed during World War II by B-52s—an aircraft whose maiden flight occurred seven years after Japan surrendered. Why a reference to wartime Japan? Boynton arranged the book with chapters on various abductees alternating with chapters on Korean and Japanese history, interesting to be sure but awkward in context. Despite the unwieldy framework, The Invitation-Only Zone contains diligent reporting into an especially bizarre facet of one of the world’s strangest countries. Choi and Shin? Hollywood couldn’t have scripted a better happy ending. In 1986, after eight years in captivity, the couple made a desperate dash during a Vienna film festival, dodging their minders and reaching the asylum of the U.S. embassy.
