Secret tapes reveal Kim Jong-il’s anxieties about South Korea and obsession with his country’s film industry
Audio presented in new documentary about South Korean couple who were kidnapped by the dictator in 1978
The voice on the tape recording is squeaky and excitable, the speaker using such a strong dialect that it is difficult even for native Korean speakers to understand. What comes across is that the man speaking in a rapid clip is anxious about his own shortcomings, and his country’s.
The speaker, in fact, is Kim Jong-il, the leader of North Korea from 1994 to 2011. Tape recordings of him from the 1980s are featured in a new documentary, The Lovers and the Despot. Although Kim died in 2011 and was succeeded by his son, Kim Jong-un, the tapes provide rare insight into the psyche of the North Korean regime, both its audaciousness and its insecurity.
Why do all of our films have the same ideological plots? There is nothing new about them. We don’t have any films that get into film festivals
Shin feared rightfully that nobody would believe this outlandish story, so he and Choi secretly taped Kim Jong-il. With a micro-recorder stashed in Choi’s purse, they captured Kim, who was then in charge of the film industry, pouring out his insecurities about how his country lagged behind capitalist rival South Korea.
“Why do all of our films have the same ideological plots? There is nothing new about them,” he says in the tapes. “We don’t have any films that get into film festivals. In South Korea, they have better technology. They are like college students and we are just in nursery schools.”
In the tapes, Kim also confesses that he had ordered the couple to be kidnapped so that they could make films for him, admitting: “I asked my adviser, who’s the best director in the south? He said that his name is Shin.”
