South Korea All the Makings of a Great Movie

By Michael S. Serrill

The story would make a remarkable screenplay. A famous movie director and his popular actress wife are abducted in Hong Kong by thugs working for a dictator's son, who wants the stars to add some luster to his own film productions. They refuse to help him and are locked up for five years. Finally, they concoct an escape plan that calls for them to play the role of their lives. They agree to make the dictator's propaganda films, but then at the first opportunity they escape to the West through Vienna with $2.3 million of the dictator's money.

Those were the amazing adventures of South Korean Movie Director Shin Sang Ok and his actress wife Choi Un Hui. Or at least that is what they told the press last week, when the pair suddenly surfaced in the U.S. Some skeptics who have followed the saga, however, openly wondered whether the tale was a little too strange even for fiction.

This much is known. Shin, now 59, was once a king of the film industry in South Korea, where he produced more than 200 movies, many of them award winners. The beautiful Choi, 54, was adored by millions. When both disappeared in 1978, their public jumped to the conclusion that they were the victims of foul play. Industry insiders suggested the film couple had fled from financial troubles. Shin apparently had not made a film since 1975. Years passed with no word of the pair's whereabouts. Then, in 1984, Shin and Choi showed up in Yugoslavia, claiming that they had voluntarily defected to North Korea. The South Korean government insisted that the Pyongyang regime was controlling their movements. But the couple, who produced perhaps as many as six films in North Korea, were apparently free to travel across Europe with incomes of $3 million a year.

The State Department confirmed that the couple had appeared at the U.S. embassy in Vienna this past March 21. They had stopped in the Austrian capital on their way to Budapest, where they were to begin work on a film about Genghis Khan. So their story goes, they fled to the embassy in a taxi with another cab full of North Korean agents in hot pursuit. Shin claimed last week that he was so trusted by North Korean officials that they had deposited $2.3 million in a Vienna bank account for his use.

In Baltimore last week, the twosome said that they had been kidnaped by Kim Jong Il, 45, the son of North Korea's strongman Kim Il Sung, 74. The younger Kim, they said, is a film buff with 20,000 reels in his personal collection. According to Shin and Choi, he has taken over much of the work of governing. They further claim that anyone caught criticizing the Kims is summarily thrown in prison.

In South Korea, the reappearance of the two film stars was greeted with public expressions of delight. In North Korea, officials issued contradictory statements. One declared that they were thieves whose only goal was to embezzle North Korean funds. The other brought the incident full circle, insisting that the couple had been "kidnaped by the South Koreans and the Americans."

With reporting by Edwin M. Reingold/Tokyo