'Shadow Flowers' portrays unwitting North Korean defector's longing to return home

North Korean defector Kim Ryun-hee in a scene from the documentary film, "Shadow Flowers" / Courtesy of Atnine Film

By Kwak Yeon-soo

Kim Ryun-hee, also spelled, “Ryen-hi,” says she was in China to spend time with relatives and get treatment for her liver ailment when she met a Chinese broker. He promised that she could make money quickly in South Korea and then return to China to pay her medical bills.

Even before arriving in South Korea in 2011, she already felt that she had made a terrible mistake. The broker had taken her passport, and then, once she arrived in South Korea, the South Korean National Intelligence Service told her that she had to sign a document agreeing to “defect,” and become a South Korean citizen. “Back then, I didn't know the significance of signing that document. It was a stupid mistake,” she recalled.

Since arriving in South Korea, Kim has made several attempts to return to her home in North Korea: she tried to smuggle herself out on a boat, she started spying on other defectors in the hope of being expelled and she applied for political asylum at the Vietnam Embassy, among others.

However, all of her efforts failed. She is closely supervised by the government and has been forbidden to leave the country. Her story, between 2015 and 2019, has been made into the documentary, “Shadow Flowers,” which will hit theaters Oct. 27.

Ahead of the film's release, Kim met with reporters to talk about her journey to return to North. She was accompanied by director Yi Seung-jun, whose other film, “In the Absence,” about the 2014 Sewol Ferry disaster, was nominated for Best Short Documentary at the 92nd Academy Awards.

“I got the call from director in 2015. By then, I had already tried to smuggle myself out, made several suicide attempts and spied on other defectors in the hopes of getting extradited from South Korea. I became a victim of online hate speech after my story was reported by many media outlets. I felt isolated,” she said.

North Korean defector Kim Ryun-hee poses before a press conference for the film, “Shadow Flowers,” Tuesday. Courtesy of Atnine Film

Explaining that she agreed to appear in Yi's documentary because she was introduced to him through her attorney, she said that the biggest fear she has is that she might never see her family again.

“Putting politics and ideology aside, I just want to go home to my parents, to my daughter and my husband,” she said.

According to Kim, about 30,000 North Koreans defected to the South to avoid the deadly famine in their country in the mid-1990s, punishment for committing crimes, or for other personal reasons. But she never thought about settling here. “I came to South Korea to work for one or two months. I never imagined I would be separated from my family for this long,” she said.

Filmmaker Yi said that he has always wanted to make a film about the two Koreas.

“In 2015, after reading a news article about Kim, something clicked in my head. So I went straight to Yeongcheon, where Kim was working at a plastic recycling plant, to meet her,” he said.

“I felt uncomfortable with (many) foreign filmmakers' one-sided ways of dealing with the North Korea issue. With this film, I hope to create a discourse about Kim's case, defectors in the South and our tragic history,” Yi said, referring to the Korean peninsula's over 70-year history of division.