The late mother of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un was unveiled in a video on Sunday in the latest twist to the communist state’s campaign to idolize the young commander and cement his fledgling leadership.

The 90-minute film, titled “The Mother of Great Military First Chosun,” contains a sketch of the living years of Ko Young-hui. It showed her watching a little Kim draw a picture, receiving shooting training and cleaning a field jumper owned by his deceased father, Kim Jong-il, in the 1980s or ’90s.

The narrator referred to Ko as the late Kim’s “most precious revolutionary comrade sent from heaven” and included her in a pedigree of “Great Mothers” along with the mothers of Kim Jong-il and Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-suk and Kang Pan-sok. 

Ko, a Japanese-born Korean, also posed with Kim Jong-il in the video, accessed by Japan’s Mainichi Shimbun.

Kim was “very happy to have such a loyalist like her close to him,” the narrator said.

Ko was born in 1953 in Osaka and emigrated to North Korea in the early 1960s. She had reportedly worked as a dancer in the Mansudae Art Troupe until Kim Jong-il spotted her and began living with her in the mid 1970s. She died of cancer in 2004 in Paris.

Although the two were never married, Ko is believed to have had been treated as the “first lady” while alive. She gave birth to two sons and a daughter ― Jong-chul, Jong-un and Yo-jong.

The reclusive North, which puts high priority on family background in classifying people, had avoided publicly mentioning Ko before due to her origin, experts say.

In stark contrast, the country had paid eulogy to Kim Jong-suk, Kim Jong-il’s late mother and the first wife of Kim Il-sung. She met her husband through a guerilla squad that fought against Japanese colonial rulers in the 1930s.

The regime has been stepping up its propaganda campaigns and building the personality cult around Kim Jong-un, using heroic acts and a mythical birth. Kim, believed to be in his late 20s, became supreme leader after his father died of heart disease in December.

With the latest video, the country is expected to further glorify Ko in the coming months as her son gears up to consolidate power. The film appears to have been distributed to senior military officials since May, according to the Japanese newspaper.

In January, North Korea’s state-run Korea Central TV mentioned Ko for the first time in a documentary, although it did not mention her name.

In February, the country’s Rodong Sinmun referred to Ko as the “Mother of Pyongyang” in an epic poem.

By Shin Hyon-hee (heeshin@heraldcorp.com)