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| 2026-06-29 13:59:58
(Movie Review) Hana Korea
(Movie Review) 'Hana Korea' finds quiet resilience in N. Korean defector's journey
By Lee Minji
SEOUL, June 29 (Yonhap) -- The presence of North Korean defectors is nothing new in South Korea, where tens of thousands of people born in the North, or whose parents hail from the North, have made new homes south of the border.
"Hana Korea," a Danish-Korean collaboration directed by Danish filmmaker Frederik Solberg, who co-wrote it with Sharon Sung-jae Choi, who received the spotlight as Korean auteur Bong Joon-ho's witty and precise interpreter, offers a fresh take on the lives of North Korean defectors through a quiet but realistic lens.
Hye-sun (Kim Min-ha) is a young woman who arrives in South Korea after escaping her rural hometown in the North Korean province of Ryanggang via China. She leaves behind a brother working at a distant factory and an ailing mother.
Following her mother's advice "to live like a viper," Hye-sun survives unspeakable hardships as an undocumented North Korean resident in China before making her way to South Korea and entering Hanawon, a state-run resettlement center for defectors like her.
Rather than appearing excited or happy to begin a new life in the South, Hye-sun remains distant and cautious. Her sole goal is to earn the money an "uncle" demands, to provide medicine for her sick mother.
Still, she befriends fellow defectors through her stay at Hanawon: Bomyi (Ahn Seo-hyun), a bubbly teen defector who was born to North Korean parents in China and has never actually lived in the North, and Sook-hee (Kim Joo-ryoung), an older defector who left behind a nine-year-old son in China.
Together, the three women build a friendship that transcends age and extends beyond their time at Hanawon, sharing laughs over red-bean buns and standing by one another as they confront real-world struggles after leaving the resettlement center.
Much of the film unfolds quietly, without dramatic twists, but it offers food for thought in the most mundane moments.
In one subtle scene, Hye-sun musters the courage to ask for the phone number of a workplace colleague who had helped her. But she appears to drift away from her as the colleague talks about wanting to escape her boring life and says she can always return to her parent's house, a place Hye-sun can no longer return.
The colleague nonchalantly gives Hye-sun her Instagram handle, saying she can reach her through direct messages, the preferred way of communication for many young South Koreans, at which Hye-sun appears dumbfounded.
In keeping with the film's soft and subtle tone, Kim delivers a radiant performance, conveying Hye-sun's deep emotions through her eyes and moments of silence.
The film's slow takes effectively highlight the gap between Hye-sun's life in the North and her new life in Seoul, contrasting scenes of nature with the glitzy, nocturnal views of the megacity of the South Korean capital.
The enigmatic soundtrack adds to that sense of unfamiliarity, painting ordinary scenes of South Korea in a way that reflects how foreign they must feel to the defectors.
Without dwelling heavily on the unfathomable struggles Hye-sun has endured, the film offers a quietly relieving conclusion, capturing her resilience as she strives to move forward and ultimately becomes someone who can say, calmly and confidently, that she is from North Korea.
"Hana Korea" is based on true life stories and interviews with defectors. A total of 224 North Korean defectors arrived in South Korea last year, 198 of them women, bringing the cumulative number of defectors who have resettled in the South to 34,538, according to Seoul government data.
The film premiered in the Flash Forward section of the Busan International Film Festival last year, where it won the Flash Forward Audience Award.
It is set for release July 8.
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