S Korean film director abducted by North dies

SEOUL, Apr 12 (Reuters) Shin Sang-ok, a South Korean film director whose own life had more twists than many Hollywood thrillers, including being kidnapped by North Korean agents to make propaganda films, has died, a movie industry official said.

An official at the Korea Directors' Association in Seoul said Shin died yesterday. Media reports said he had been suffering from liver problems.

Shin, 80, learned his craft in Japan and rose to fame in South Korea after World War Two helping build up the country's fledgling film industry.

He started his career working on the first major movie South Korea made after it won independence from Japan in 1945.

His directorial debut was ''Akya'', which translates as ''evil night'' and was made in 1952 at the height of the Korean War.

His 1958 film called ''Jiokhwa'' featured the first on-screen kiss in a South Korean film. Many of his movies were melodramas about women faced with the difficulties of meeting the expectations placed on them by South Korean society.

He later started a production company called Shin Films, which turned out hundreds of movies in the 1960s.

He married actress Choi Eun-hee in a storybook wedding and the two became known as the first couple of South Korean cinema.

But under repressive rulers in the 1970s, Shin's output decreased dramatically.

In a bizarre turn of events in 1978, when he was filming in Hong Kong, Shin and his wife were abducted in separate incidents, the South Korean government at the time said.

Current North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, who was then a rising power in the communist state, is suspected of being the mastermind behind the abductions.

North Korea, and a few people in South Korea, have said the couple went to the communist state willingly.

Due to a failed escape attempt, Shin told South Korean media he spent about four years in a North Korean prison camp, where he had to eat grass and tree bark to survive.

Shin said he later had an audience with Kim, a film buff who reportedly has thousands of movies and enjoys spy thrillers.

Kim told Shin he wanted him to find new ways to enliven the North Korean film industry and wanted his wife Choi cast as a leading lady.

The best known work Shin made in North Korea is a monster movie called ''Pulgasari'', which critics have said is a crude rip-off of the Godzilla movies from Japan.

Shin and Choi escaped from North Korea during a trip to Vienna in 1986 and they then spent a few years in the United States where Shin worked as a producer under the name Simon Sheen and made a few mostly forgettable movies.

The couple returned to South Korea in 2000. The last film Shin made was about a man suffering from Alzheimer's disease, tentatively called ''Winter Story'', which has yet to be released, according to Yonhap news agency.

REUTERS KD PM1412