This graphic novel, published first in German, is based on a true story, and if you don’t already know that tale (I’m afraid I didn’t), it will astonish you. A successful actor and her movie director ex-husband are kidnapped by an enemy state, so that they might make movies to please a dictator. On paper, this is the stuff of a disaster-ridden major motion picture, dreamed up by some crazed auteur. But it really happened. In 1978, Choi Eun-Hee, a celebrated actor in her native South Korea, was kidnapped by North Korean agents in Hong Kong, and transported to the city of Namp’o, where she was met by Kim Jong-il, the son of the Great Leader, Kim Il-sung, and then head of the country’s propaganda unit and film studios.
When Choi’s ex-husband, the director Shin Sang-ok, travelled to Hong Kong to try to find her, the same thing happened to him – though having twice tried to escape, he was eventually sent to a prison camp to be tortured and kept in solitary confinement (Choi’s surroundings were luxurious, even if she was unable to leave them). In 1983, Kim initiated, with no advance warning, a meeting between Choi and Shin at a dinner in Pyongyang. Reunited, the two of them rekindled their relationship and Kim, the film fanatic, now explained the reason for their kidnapping: they were to shoot big-budget masterpieces for him, movies good enough to be shown at film festivals around the world. In the years that followed, they duly made several films, including Pulgasari, a North Korean version of Godzilla. In 1986, however, while they were at a festival in Vienna, they gave their guards the slip, and made it to the American embassy where they requested asylum.
