It was the first of four films Shin and Choi made during their abduction to North Korea under the orders of Kim Jong Il.

Adapted from Bloody Conference(혈분만국회(血憤萬國會)), a play allegedly written by Kim Il Sung during his guerrilla years, the film retells the dramatized story of the Hague Secret Emissary Affair.

The affair ensued when the Korean emperor king Gojong sent three unauthorized emissaries to the talks of the Hague Convention of 1907.

The emissaries were to protest against Korea's occupation by Japan to the international community in order to get the great powers to overturn the Japan–Korea Treaty of 1905.

Although in reality the Hague affair was an unremarkable diplomatic effort, a commonly believed myth among Koreans is that Ri Jun committed suicide inside the conference hall.

An Emissary of No Return was shot on-location in several Eastern Bloc countries, primarily Czechoslovakia, as well as in North Korea.

The film begins with a North Korean man visiting The Hague in the 1980s to pay his respects at the grave of one of the secret emissaries,[4] Ri Jun (played by Kim Jun-sik).

[4] When Ri finds that the delegates of the great powers remain unsympathetic to the Korean cause, he commits harakiri in front of them, convincing them of his dedication.

In order to protest to the international community,[7] the Korean emperor king Gojong sent three secret emissaries to the talks of the Hague Convention of 1907.

[6] The emissaries were refused on the basis that Korea had lost its sovereignty and its external affairs were now handled by Japan.

[6] An Emissary of No Return presents the dramatized story,[7] resulting in a "typical nationalist melodrama",[9] and, partly, a boring "lecture" on fictionalized history.

[7] Kim Jong Il ordered Shin to set up a production company for his film projects in North Korea.

[16] After discussing with Kim Jong Il, Shin had chosen the Hague Secret Emissary Affair as the theme of the film.

[18] Shin was drawn to it because the event it portrays had taken place abroad, in The Hague, in hopes that he could escape on the pretext of filming at the actual location.

Although the Czech technical crew was very qualified, the Koreans lacked a common language with them, causing problems in the production.

[24] Shots depicting The Hague were also filmed on the streets of Prague,[25] which "might look strange to audiences with knowledge of European architecture but it certainly didn't bother anyone in North Korea."

[30] Shin petitioned Kim Jong Il that he could travel to Leningrad to shoot additional scenes for the film to improve it.

According to Paul Fischer, author of A Kim Jong-Il Production, the film thus "marked a turning point in North Korean culture: the very first time that even the citizens with the lowest songbun [social status] were able to see, however subtly, that the world outside the Workers' Paradise was not the hell Kim Il-Sung had told them it was.

Screenings were made compulsory and were followed by group discussions in which cinema goers were supposed to relate the main character's suicide to their own lives.

[37] There, it was freshly reviewed as having "a broad, oriental-flavoured theme in guises ranging from the march-like to patriotic and romantic for its story of Korean heroism at the turn of the century – a major surprise".

The couple was, however, constantly surrounded by minders working for Kim Jong Il, so the plan never materialized.