You could say that North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il has two primary
obsessions: maintaining nuclear weapons capability as a means of
protecting his “hermit kingdom,” and thwarting pressure from outside
forces like from America and the rest of the industrialized world to
open his country to modern things like electricity… and he’s obsessed
with film. He loves movies. It’s rumoured that he has one of the
largest private film collections in the world. His favourite film is
Gone with the Wind and his favourite actress is Elizabeth Taylor. He’s
a film collector and bona fide cinephile, but he’s much more. He’s
everything really. He’s a director, a producer, a financier, a costume
maker, set designer, screenwriter, cameraman, sound engineer… and he’s
also a film theorist. His masterwork on aesthetics and practice is “On
the Art of Cinema” (written and published in the early 1970s). In it
he gives himself the humble title, “Genius of the Cinema.” He built an
extensive film studio in Pyongyang and when he couldn’t find someone
to make his film. He did what any self-respecting eternal leader and
great president would do, he kidnapped one.
Vice founder Shane Smith visits North Korea to try and penetrate the
Korean Feature Film Studio, the state-run film production facility
west of Pyongyang: a sprawling lot that at its height produced around 40 films a year.
