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Pulgasari
불가사리
1986 · Film · 95 min
Directed by Shin Sang-ok, Chong Gon Jo
In feudal Korea, a group of starving villagers grow weary of the orders handed down to them by their controlling king and set out to use a deadly monster under their control to push his armies back.
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3 comments on Hacker News
It's actually debated whether the director was "kidnapped". Lots of people in Korea believe he went willingly.
His left-wing films had been banned in the South, and Kim Jong-il offered him superstardom, big budgets and creative control. North Korea was not as bad back then, relatively speaking. Its economy still enjoyed support from both China and the USSR and it could trade with the entire Eastern bloc. South Korea was also a dictatorial military regime at the time (didn't get democracy until 1980s), and lots of South Koreans and Koreans in Japan actually moved to the North in the 60s and 70s. Shin was also generously allowed to "escape" with his family at a film festival after he and Kim ran into creative differences.
On another note Pulgasari is an interesting film because it contains a coded criticism of the Kim regime at the end.
Though interestingly:
> though Kim despised the Japanese, he set aside his pride and flew in the special-effects team of the original films, along with Kenpachiro Satsuma, the man inside the Godzilla suit. According to Satsuma, he and his crew members thought they had been hired for a film shooting in China when they landed in North Korea instead.
The production and release sections of the Wikipedia article are interesting. It was intended for wide release by a Japanese company, then banned by the NK government after the director fled. In the 90s it saw a wide release, even in South Korea. The then-escaped director tried to sue it off the air.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulgasari
Just to clarify, the article is from 2015, but the actual movie is from 1985:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulgasari