SECRET OF MY NORTH KOREAN FATHER
South Korea - China
90 min / Drama / 35mm / 2013
24th Session of the Residence de Cannes (Cinefondation) 2012
SYNOPSIS
One summer, a family of modest means moves into a popular district of Busan in South Korea. Shin, the father, had migrated to the south in 1991, fleeing his native country: North Korea. Today, he works as a courier. One day, a call from a smuggler turns the family upside down and reveals its secret. Ji-hyun, the eldest child, a sixteen-year-old daughter, learns that her father had been married to a first wife in North Korea, and that her biological mother might be sent back to the north following her arrest by police in China. Try as she might, Ji-hyun is unable to find a way to free her mother...
Years pass. Ji-hyun has grown up. She is working in Seoul for a boat building company. Her father, Shin, dies on the day she is promoted. Through her half-brother who is preparing to go do his mandatory military service in South Korea, Ji-hyun learns at the funeral that Shin secretly went to China before he died. The following day, the reading of the will once again throws the family into turmoil: it reveals they have a younger sister and Ji-hyun is asked to find her and bring her to the south. With her half-brother, Ji-hyun leaves to search as far as China for her North Korean sister..
DIRECTOR’S NOTE
The project is inspired by my journey through China and South Korea, during which I made a documentary entitled Looking for North Koreans. I spent several days at a smuggler’s house. There I heard disturbing truelife stories that I couldn’t get out of my head. In South Korea, I met several North Korean immigrants who had had to leave their families behind when they left the country. They were trying to get their families out using Chinese smugglers.
The film focuses on two periods in Ji-hyun’s life, when she discovers the existence of her biological mother and then, when adult, that she has a North Korean younger sister. Considering the issues which then arose, I became interested by the confrontation between her half-brother and herself and highlighted this issue because her half-brother, Tae-soo, was readying himself for two years of mandatory military service and would have to be prepared to fight against North Korea, the native country of his father and half-sister.
Through this film, I hope to share the pain of the families separated by the division of these two countries. Thanks to this film, I too hope to understand the human issues affecting my country.
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