Kim Jong-il owned 20,000 films. Not a curated collection. A hoard. Every genre, every era, every country of origin. He had a private cinema in each of his palaces — and he had multiple palaces — stocked with prints, projectors, and a personal projectionist on call at all hours. His favorites, by his own account, were the Friday the 13th series, Rambo, and anything by Elizabeth Taylor. He watched them repeatedly, taking notes.
He also wrote a book about cinema. On the Art of the Cinema, published in 1973, is a 300-page treatise on film theory that reads like a graduate thesis written by someone who has seen every movie ever made and misunderstood the point of all of them. It argues that film’s highest purpose is to serve the revolution, that the director is the supreme creative authority, and that socialist realism is the only valid aesthetic. It is, by any reasonable standard, a bad book about movies written by a man with excellent taste in movies and no understanding of why his taste contradicted his theory.
This is the obsession. Not power. Not nuclear weapons. Not the cult of personality that made him, officially, the greatest genius in human history. Cinema. The man who ran one of the most isolated and controlled states on earth was, in his private life, a cinephile whose knowledge of international film exceeded most professional critics’.
How Deep It Went
In 1978, he kidnapped South Korean film director Shin Sang-ok and his ex-wife, actress Choi Eun-hee. Separately. Had them abducted by agents and brought to Pyongyang. He kept Shin in a prison camp for four years for attempting to escape. Then he reunited the couple, gave them a production budget, and told them to make movies for North Korea.
They made seven films. Including Pulgasari, a 1985 Godzilla-style monster movie that is simultaneously a propaganda film about feudal oppression and a genuinely entertaining kaiju picture. Kim oversaw the production personally. He gave notes. Detailed notes. On lighting, on pacing, on the monster’s movements. He was, by Shin’s later account, a knowledgeable and specific producer — someone who understood camera angles, editing rhythms, and dramatic structure at a level that would have been impressive from a film school graduate and was surreal from the man who also controlled North Korea’s nuclear program.
Shin and Choi escaped in 1986, during a trip to Vienna. They went to the American embassy. Kim reportedly mourned the loss not of the propaganda value but of his best director.
What You’d Hear
Talk to Kim Jong-il and the conversation would revolve around film with a velocity that left no room for politics, human rights, or the nuclear question. He’d discuss Kurosawa’s use of weather. He’d debate the merits of practical effects versus early CGI. He’d ask whether you’d seen a specific Hong Kong action film from 1982 and, if you hadn’t, he’d describe the third-act fight sequence in shot-by-shot detail with the enthusiasm of a teenager who’s just discovered a band no one else has heard of.
His speaking voice, according to the few Westerners who met him, was higher-pitched than expected and animated. He wore platform shoes — adding two to three inches to his 5’3” frame — and a gray Mao suit that was the North Korean equivalent of a filmmaker’s uniform. He drank Hennessy cognac. Reportedly $720,000 worth per year. He was, according to North Korean state media, a prolific golfer who shot 38 under par in his first round, including 11 holes-in-one. This was obviously untrue. The film criticism, by contrast, was legitimate.
He sent his personal chef around the world to source specific foods — sushi from Japan, pizza from Italy, Big Macs from Beijing. The chef, Kenji Fujimoto, later escaped and wrote a memoir describing Kim as a man who treated dining with the same obsessive specificity he applied to films: every ingredient sourced, every preparation supervised, every detail controlled.
Try Changing the Subject
You couldn’t. Or rather, you could, and he’d answer briefly and competently — he was not stupid about geopolitics — and then pivot back to cinema. The nuclear program was a tool. The military was an inheritance. The cult of personality was a system he maintained because the alternative was collapse. But the movies were the thing that engaged him. The 20,000-film collection was his real legacy, and the kidnapping of a director was, in the logic of his obsession, a perfectly rational act: if you can’t hire the talent you need, you acquire it by other means.
He died in 2011, on his personal train, reportedly from a heart attack. The state funeral was elaborate. The international reaction was complex. But somewhere in a palace in Pyongyang, 20,000 films sat in the dark, waiting for a projectionist who would never call for them again.
The dictator who controlled a nation of 25 million people was, in private, a film obsessive whose knowledge and taste exceeded his ideology. The contradiction never resolved.