The Lovers and the Despot
Cert PG, 100 mins, ★★★★
The extraordinary, true tale that unravels in The Lovers and the Despot, a documentary from Robert Cannan and Ross Adam, might at first be dismissed as too incredible even for a thriller.
It begins, conventionally enough, with a love story between the glamorous actress Choi Eun-hee and the raffish director Shin Sang-ok, stars of the South Korean film industry in the 1950s and 1960s.
Shin and Choi married and adopted two children: a girl and a boy. When Choi – the principal narrator, since Shin died in 2006 – recalls that era, she remembers the reverential bustle around her celebrity, how service miraculously improved when she stepped on a plane.
