North Korea’s late former leader, Kim Jong Il, took film seriously. As a young man, he styled himself an auteur, overseeing the production of all films made in his country and the authorship of a book titled “On the Art of the Cinema.”
He is reputed to have had a film library with more than 20,000 titles. He even went so far as to kidnap one of South Korea’s leading directors and his then ex-wife (who later remarried) to reinvigorate his country’s movie industry.
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