Film Review: Defectors by Hyun kyung Kim

A Featured Review by Alice Stephens. "As a Korean adoptee . . . the film deeply resonated with me in its depiction of the calamitous, and yet hidden, trauma of family separation."

Director: Hyun kyung Kim
Released: April 26, 2023 (Visions du Réel Film Festival, premiere)
YouTube Trailer

In the preamble to the documentary film, Defectors, directed by Hyun kyung Kim, a montage made with a map and scissors illustrates how the history of modern Korea is one of separations. The Japanese occupation in 1910 separated the Koreans from their language and culture. Political governance was divided at the thirty-eighth parallel by foreign powers in 1945. North and South Korea were established in 1948 and the Korean War ignited in 1950, resulting in a complete separation of land, country, and people in 1953, when the armistice was signed, irrevocably tearing apart many families. As a Korean adoptee permanently separated from her mother when sent overseas to become a part of an American family in 1968, the film deeply resonated with me in its depiction of the calamitous, and yet hidden, trauma of family separation.

It is the reverberations of these family separations that Kim examines in Defectors. Using decades of footage of her parents, as well as interviews with a North Korean defector that span three years, Kim powerfully and intimately demonstrates how Korea remains a country at war.