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.com
"The 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 Times
"An 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 Post
"Exhaustively researched, highly engrossing chronicle of the outrageous abduction of a pair of well-known South Korean filmmakers by the nefarious network of North Korea's Kim Jong-Il."-Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

A Note on Sources
Cast of Characters
Introduction - August 1982
Reel One: A Sense of Destiny
1. A Photograph on the Blue House Lawn
2. Director Shin and Madame Choi
3. Shrimp Among Whales
4. A Double Rainbow over Mount Paekdu
5. Kim Jong-Il's First Loves
6. Fathers and Sons
7. Inside the Pyongyang Picture Show
8. A Three-Second Kiss
9. Repulse Bay
Reel Two: Guests of the Dear Leader
10.The Hermit Kingdom
11. Accused
12. Muscials, Movies, and Ideological Studies
13. Taken
14. The Others
15. Escape from Chestnut Valley
16. Shin Sang-Ok Died Here
17. The Torture Position
18. Division 39
19. The Hunger Strike
20. Director Shin is Coming
Intermission: The People's Actress Woo In-Hee
Reel Three: Produced by Kim Jong-Il
21. Together
22. The Tape Recorder
23. Lights, Camera...
24. Out of the North
25. Like a European Movie
26. The Press Conference
27. Same Bed, Different Dreams
28. A Full Shooting Schedule
29. The Rubber Monster
30: Vienna
31. From Kim to Kim
32. The Stars and Stripes
Epilogue - 2013
Afterword