Madame & Little Boy
Madame & Little Boy
In 1978 the legendary South Korean actress Choi Eun-Hee was kidnapped in Hong Kong by North Korean agents and brought to Pyongyang. Two weeks later her ex-husband, the director Shin Sang-Ok, was abducted to North Korea as well. After five years the couple was offered a "contract" which included a public statement declaring their willful defection to North Korea and a major film budget. Two years later the artist-pair managed to escape, not yet finished was Pulgasari (1985), a Japanese-style monsterfilm based on a Korean legend and made in the vein of Godzilla. As an experiment with situated narration this video essay takes a standpoint against documentarism and common documentary practice. "Little Boy" was the code name of the Hiroshima bomb.