The Saturday Night Special

Normally Saturday Night is reserved for documentaries but this movie is a piece of history and is bizarre enough to warrant a showing tonight. This is a North Korean movie. It isn’t the first North Korean Movie that we have seen here but this one has a story.

During the reign of Kim Il Sun, his Son Kim Jong Il became the leader of the Propaganda and Agitation Department of the North Korean Government. His primary goal was to create quality movies for the North Korean people so that their people would have not appetite for western movies. Kim Jong Il actually liked western movies and thought that some of them taught wholesome ideals but there were other ideals in the content of these movies that were not conducive to creating the kind of society that his Father was trying to build. Kim Jong Il wanted to create a North Korean Hollywood but by his own observation, North Korean Movies really sucked. North Koreans were too institutionalized to produce the kind of passion he wanted to see in his films. He needed some fresh ideas, some new blood.

So he decided to kidnap an award winning South Korean movie director and his wife, a famous South Korean actress. He put them to work making movies. One of his all time favorite movies was Godzilla. The problem was that Godzilla is Japanese. Kim Jong Il wanted a North Korean Godzilla. It was upon the orders of Kim Jong Il himself that the movie you are about to see was created by the movie director that he had kidnapped, Shin Sang Ok.

Our Saturday Night Flight takes us to Pyongyang, North Korea…