"The feelings must be continually built up into the decisive moment for action is reached, and they can be brought to a head. Only in this way is it possible to generate powerful dramatic tension and emotional excitement. If the emotions ... do not come to a head at the right moment, they will fail to make any impression on the audience, because they will lack credibility." -- "On the Art of the Cinema"

Genghis Khan, or more specifically, John Wayne as Genghis Khan in the notoriously awful "The Conqueror," was the inspiration for Shin's last collaboration with Kim. ("The Conqueror," meanwhile, had its own grim nuclear coda: During filming in Utah, winds blew radiation onto the set from nearby nuclear bomb testing grounds. Many of the cast and crew -- including Wayne -- may have contracted cancer as a result.)

"I was sickened at seeing that movie," Shin Sang-Ok said in 1999. "I did not like American actors appearing in the movie with mustaches attached beneath their big noses." He had long wanted to make an authentically Mongolian or at least Asian version. In Kim Jong Il he found a producer who shared his enthusiasm for the subject of invading hordes. They agreed that this follow-up to "Pulgasari" would make a good export, even if it didn't meet with the approval of Kim's father as a tool for thought control. As Heginbotham puts it: "By all accounts, [Kim] enjoys movies that his people certainly would never be allowed to watch."

Shin convinced Kim that the film would have more marketability if distributed by a European country, rather than unfashionable North Korea. So plans were made for a joint venture with a company in Austria. Soon, Kim would trust the director to travel to Western Europe for a business meeting.

As a trip to Vienna approached, Shin writes, a plan began to form. They had no doubts about wanting to leave their comfortable lifestyle. "To be in Korea living a good life ourselves and enjoying movies while everyone else was not free was not happiness, but agony," he writes. Then they boarded a plane for Vienna, never to return.

The next month, the New York Times reported that two South Korean film legends had emerged in Baltimore to meet with American reporters, relating "a story they found more bizarre than a screenplay." Shin and Choi first turned up at an American Embassy in Vienna. During a business trip, they'd been able to escape with the help of a Japanese movie critic friend of theirs -- who has only been identified in his report by a codename, "K." Meeting him for lunch, they fled by taxi to the American Embassy, shaking off one of Kim's agents in another taxi.

After the embarrassing escape of his star propagandists, Kim Jong Il shelved "Pulgasari" and every other Shin film. The monster movie was not seen outside the country until 1998, when, amid a dawning feeling of openness in North Korean relations with the rest of Asia, another Japanese critic campaigned for its release -- as an important work deserving of more attention, and a source of box-office dollars for the North's disastrous economy. It bombed. In Seoul, a total of about 1,000 people saw it during its limited release.

Shin Sang-Ok remains controversial. At the Pusan International Film Festival in 2001, a screening was planned for his favorite work, "Runaway." But the public prosecutor of Seoul halted the showing by invoking South Korea's harsh National Security Law, which bans any action that could benefit the North.

Shin has worked hard to dispel any impression that he remains friends with his ex-executive producer. In an open letter to the South Korean president following the Sept. 11 attacks, he wrote that his first reaction to the World Trade Center collapse was that it was in Kim Jong Il's nature to do the same to Seoul. Protesting a thawing in relations, and contending that Kim had not changed, he warned against being fooled by the North Korean leader. "It is inevitable that North Korea will collapse," he wrote. "Then how will it end? In a suicidal explosion."

Kim Jong Il continues to issue bold words of guidance to his filmmakers. His words are reprinted on a gigantic placard outside the Revolutionary Museum of the Ministry of Culture on the outskirts of Pyongyang. One says, "MAKE MORE CARTOONS." Nearby is an enormous statue of Kim's father, surrounded by filmmakers and a gargantuan movie camera.

His export hopes continually dashed, Kim Jong Il still finds a way to make about 60 films a year. He invites potential distributors to screenings in Pyongyang, the BBC reports, only to be told that the material he's pitched just won't appeal to Western sensibilities. Now, having kicked weapons inspectors out of his country, and engaging in a dangerous game of chicken with the West, he seems to have given up hope that he can sway anyone through the art of cinema. And that, ultimately, might prove an ominous sign of things to come.

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