An alternative title for Hana Korea could well have been “Portrait of a Young Woman as a Defector”. At its centre is Cho Hyesun, forced to leave behind her home, family and life in North Korea to be able to earn enough to pay for her ailing mother’s expensive medication. A decision driven by desperation but one that also becomes an escape route from unspoken strangleholds and repression, an act motivated by the urgent need to provide for the one she holds dear but also makes her go on a pursuit of personal happiness and fulfilment.
It takes her first to China (recounted, not shown) and then onwards to South Korea. We start off by meeting her in the airplane that has come in from China. She is taken for routine questioning and the protocol of strip search by the South Korean authorities and eventually to a cultural integration and orientation centre with a bunch of others seeking asylum.
Hyesun is clear-eyed about the way forward—education in a nursing school holds the key to march into the future in the competitive world that values excellence and high performance over everything else. But can she ever cut herself and move on from the life she has left behind? What is the price she’d have to pay? She keeps stressing on how she didn’t mean to leave her mother behind and how leaving home left a hole in the heart. Will a new home fill the void?
A Denmark-South Korea coproduction, Hana Korea offers an intriguing mix of perspectives—that of the insiders and the outsider— when it comes to the characters and the situations they are caught in. The gaze is both intimate and distanced. There is an authenticity about things but also an objective sense of detachment.
It quite obviously emerges from the fact that the Korean story marks the directorial debut of a Danish filmmaker Frederik Solberg, but one that has been co-written with Sharon “Sungjae” Choi who many an international journalist would remember as Bong Joon-ho’s interpreter during Parasite. Drawn from the lives of North Korean defectors, it has three major names of Korean film industry playing the key roles—Kim Minha of Pachinko fame plays Hyesun. Kim Joo-ryung (Squid Game) and An Seo-hyun (Okja) are the lifelong friends, Sookhee and Bomyi, that she makes in the orientation centre. The three ladies are in excellent form, individually and as a group as well.
Hana Korea plays on the contradictions inherent in the situation—the commitment to self-realisation as opposed to the guilt of having to leave the near and dear ones behind even if for their welfare. The promise of freedom doesn’t come easy either; it demands a willingness to change and adapt to new cultures and ways of living, too conservative in China, and uber modern in South Korea. Essentially nothing quite comes easy in life. There’s always a price to pay, struggles have to be endured and sacrifices to be made.
Hana Korea uses the epistolary mode, Hyesun expressing her thoughts and concerns through the letters she writes to her mother, which also chart out her own inner growth. From following her mother’s advice—“Be like a viper”—Hyesun goes on the assert that “I will no longer live like a viper, hiding in the grass.”
At one level there’s something rather neat and tidy, simple and predictable about the refugee story but some amount of complexity is arrived at with the seamless mix of the many moods and dilemmas of Hyesun. There’s the huge emotional baggage of the past that she can’t shed but it is balanced out with moments of genuine mirth and humour resulting from the many experiences of culture shock. Living independently in a big city, for instance, something a lot of us may take for granted, could be a staggering achievement for another. Or the brush with consumerism, using debit cards and getting overwhelmed with access to makeup and video games. But the reality is still not quite as rosy as depicted in the popular K-Dramas stealthily accessed in North Korea on USB sticks.
The rhythm of the film parallels Hyesun’s life, tentative at the start to more robust, assured and poised as we move along. There’s the other movement as well, that of the disintegration of a family, individualisation to formation of communities in isolation, something that modern urban living is anyhow all about.