Already classed among those nebulous rogue states for its nuclear ambitions, human rights abuses and intransigence, the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea will be further tarred by Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story. This first feature documentary from co-directors/producers/writers husband and wife Chris Sheridan and Patty Kim -- he also edits and does camera and sound, while Jane Campion executive produced -- details a bizarre twist on our own homegrown rash of headlined kidnappings: a Japanese cause célèbre as yet unknown here, with ramifications for Pacific Rim Asia and, today, for world politics at the highest levels.

A little diffuse in its excessive scene shifts, and not really the “true-crime . . . nail-biting . . . Sophoclean . . . tension of mystery-intrigue” that reviewers have seen, the film plays its hand fairly early on. What remains is the anguish, love and devotion of an ordinary couple -- he a banker, she a full-time mother of three -- plus to a less detailed degree of other families, thrust into extraordinary circumstances way beyond their experience as private citizens. That the central causal events are soon enough revealed to be Machiavellian in nature, with potentially disastrous consequences -- “we had no idea this would turn into something huge” -- does not overshadow Shigeru and Sakie Yokota’s unwavering three-decade search for their daughter. That well-meant campaign promises are quickly tempered by realpolitik, that leaders out-and-out lie, that lives are subordinated to statesmen’s maneuverings, comes as no surprise, nor, in contrast to the development in Jack Lemmon’s Ed Horman character in Missing, is there any alteration in the parents’ dignified consistency and beliefs.

The late 1977 disappearance of choir-singing badminton-playing Megumi on her way home from school is considered by Niigata police as either a kidnapping for ransom or else the work of a sexual predator. No home videos, but a few snapshots and parents and younger twin brothers’ descriptions flesh out more an emotional than clearly visual picture of the thirteen-year-old with dimples and chubby cheeks. Appeals through the media bring no response, but over the next few years Mr. Abe, editor-in-chief of the Sankie newspaper, pieces together a pattern of “polite” attacks and disappearances, unlike this one in that they involve couples in their twenties and occur on deserted nighttime beaches facing eastwards towards Korea.

“Spirited away, as if by God,” yet Abe surmises, and writes, that these cases are somehow related to that bellicose nation across the Sea of Japan. But it is not until the even later revelations of An, a repentant defector from there with a contract out for him, that the truth will emerge. Plotting to sow international terror, blow up passenger flights and disrupt Seoul’s 1988 Olympics, Pyongyang subsequently admitted to whisking away thirteen Japanese nationals -- end titles indicate hundreds more Japanese, South Koreans and others -- to instruct its saboteurs not only in the language but also the mannerisms to enable them to pose as Japanese.

Such SPECTRE machinations went awry in the case of Megumi, believed older by a Mr. Chung, who was finishing his abduction assignment and now “felt terrible” about the random mistake. When the truth is out, various families of the disappeared take to the streets, and there are media and political forums, spearheaded by the girls’ suddenly celebrity parents. In the face of the “totally false, our country has nothing to do with abductions or terrorism,” new Prime Minister Koizumi pledges clarification and rectification from a historic 2002 official visit to dictator counterpart Kim Jong Il. But considerations of state, normalization of relations, “missiles and nuclear weapons . . . and rice shipments are important, too,” and the issue is fudged. “If this were America,” Shigeru thinks, “they’d go to war.”

After a quarter-century, five surviving abductees are allowed to return home, to national rejoicing and tears. The rest are given out as dead, from drowning, car accidents, illness, a heart attack, gas poisoning--including Megumi, a suicide at twenty-nine. Their graves and remains have supposedly been flooded away, but Megumi’s parents refuse to accept that. Testing of maybe contaminated DNA shows that the ashes sent them two years later were false, there are reported sightings, and a video recording of their granddaughter Hegyong, who “didn’t know my mom is Japanese,” gives them room to doubt.

Other parents have died, but the ageing Yokotas continue and even testified before Congress in Washington. As Mrs. Yokota puts it, they want their daughter to say, “Finally, I’m free.” 

(Released by Safari Media Film; not rated by MPAA.)