For many North Korean defectors, crossing the border is not the end of a story but the start of another kind of struggle. Frederik Sølberg’s Hana Korea, co-written with Sharon Choi, goes straight into that fraught second chapter. The film is a great story of adaptation and loss: how the comforts of a new country can feel like reopened scars, and how survival requires not only physical escape but the constant transformation of the self. Sølberg and Choi turn firsthand accounts into a work of empathy, a story built on attentive listening that draws its moral force from the care with which it bears witness.

The film depicts Hyesun (Kim Minha), a 21-year-old from Ryanggang Province, North Korea. Hyesun’s flight is practical rather than heroic: she leaves home to earn money for her mother’s life-sustaining medication. The film opens not with celebration but with the bureaucratic aftertaste of arrival. Seoul’s intelligent officers – polite in tone, sharp in practice – ask the kind of questions that feel less like welcome than examination. Sølberg stages these early sequences with an almost documentary realism. The rooms are fluorescent, the pauses long-ish, and every answer might close off a route to safety. We are reminded immediately that refuge is a condition granted and policed, not freely received.

Once admitted, Hyesun is sent to Hanawon, the official integration centre where defectors are taught the rhythms and rituals of South Korean daily life. It is here, in small domestic details, that Hana Korea finds its emotional vocabulary. Sølberg dwells on trivial things at first – the warm give of an ondol-heated floor, the first curious chew of fruit-flavoured gum, the overwhelming sight of aisles in a convenience store – and through those moments conveys the vertigo of excess. A simple hot meal, or the dazzle of a neon sign, is felt like a philosophical proposition: what do you keep of the life you left, and what do you allow yourself to want?

Sølberg pairs this observational eye with a patient, classical visual style. Cinematography captures the contrasts of Hyesun’s new world – the unfamiliar rhythms of South Korean daily life and the hyper-modern geometry of Seoul: glass façades and endless LED advertisements. The contrast extends beyond the visual, charting the daily challenges Hyesun faces as she learns to manage modern life, from handling a bank card to understanding Instagram. 

Sølberg and Choi’s screenplay gives the film its ethical centre: the private voice. Hyesun’s interior life is often conveyed through spoken ‘letters’ to her mother – monologues inserted between scenes, offering intimate insight into her thoughts and emotions and shaping the beat of her new life in South Korea. At one point, the film suggests that Hyesun’s account of her escape may be partial or revised, Sølberg treats that ambiguity not as a narrative trick but as a humane insight into how truth can be adapted for safety. 

Kim’s performance carries the entire film. She is unshowy and searingly exact; a series of small choices builds Hyesun’s unforgettable presence. There’s a natural honesty in how she tackles everyday tasks. Whether she’s studying late at night for nursing qualifications or waitressing, Kim shows the stubborn hope behind every small achievement. Kim’s skill at expressing hope, small mistakes, private laughter, and private sorrow in a single look makes her performance sublime.

The supporting ensemble, Joo-ryung Kim and Seo-Hyun An, rounds out the portrait of a community in flux. Hana Korea is careful to show that integration is not simply a bureaucratic programme but a social negotiation, one in which prejudice, class anxieties, and cultural ignorance complicate the most ordinary ambitions – like finding steady work or acquiring a uniform skill set. 

Sølberg’s background in documentary filmmaking serves him well. The camera often watches from a modest remove, letting Hyesun’s life unfurl in scenes of domestic rhythm: a class in the integration centre, a clumsy job interview, a night study session. This curb on overt dramatics regenerates the film’s power: because the director trusts his actors and their material, the emotional tone stays true rather than pushed.

One of the film’s strongest choices is letting pain exist naturally, neither hidden nor overexposed. When Hyesun confesses that even in safety, it feels like my past keeps watching over me, that line compounds the film’s persistent weight: the notion that physical sanctuary does not automatically dissolve psychological surveillance.

In the hands of Frederik Sølberg and Sharon Choi, and through the incandescent work of Kim Minha, Hana Korea, which also had its world premiere at the Busan International Film Festival, turns out to be one of the most humane films of the season. It asks what it costs to begin again, and answers, in small, decisive acts of endurance, that the price of belonging is not exile from memory but the courage to carry it forward.

Rating:

Written by Maggie Gogler

_{View of the Arts is an online publication dedicated to films, music, and the arts, with a strong focus on the Asian entertainment industry. With rich content already available to our readers, we aim to expand our reach and grow alongside our audience by delving deeper into emerging platforms such as K-pop and Asian music more broadly. At the same time, we remain committed to exploring the vibrant and ever-evolving global landscape of film, music, and the arts, celebrating the immense talent and creativity that define these industries worldwide.}