Kim Jong Il, the awful human who spawned the Mini-Me known as North Korea’s current Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un.

Tales of his crimes against humanity aren’t anything new, but the story of his kidnapping of South Korean director Shin Sang-ok and his movie star wife Choi Eun-hee isn’t as widely known.

A new documentary called The Lovers and the Despot is set to lift the lid, British documentarians Ross Adam and Robert Cannan gaining insight into North Korea’s late supreme leader through the eyes of the kidnapped South Koreans.

Let’s see the trailer before we delve deeper:

The Daily Beast offer an exhaustive account of the story so I’ll just use some of the tastier nuggets:

After Choi was kidnapped in Hong Kong by Kim agents posing as film producers, her estranged husband Shin went searching for her and ended up in a North Korean prison for four years, fed grass and rice for trying to escape, and underwent intensive indoctrination reprogramming at Kim’s behest.

The spouses were finally reunited in the middle of Kim’s lavish birthday party, where the then-cultural minister giddily orchestrated their meeting like he was Hayley Mills in The Parent Trap. Kim’s master plan? To make them churn out new films North Korea could be proud of—and match, if not top, the quality of film coming out of their rivals to the south—and make North Korean movies great (again).

Shin, who would make 17 pro-government films with Choi during his North Korean period, appears in the film via the incredible documents and diaries he left behind. His trove of materials include hours of illicitly recorded conversations with Kim, whose voice had rarely been heard in public—let alone heard whining about South Korea’s superior movies.

[source:dailybeast]