Song Joong-ki is a North Korean refugee in new movie promos

by Jenzy

Netflix’s upcoming movie My Name is Loh Kiwan tells the story of one North Korean defector forced into a Catch-22: where do you go when the country you sought asylum in refuses to take you?

Meet Loh Kiwan, played by Song Joong-ki (Reborn Rich). He has just arrived in Belgium alone, having lost his mother in the process of fleeing North Korea. He’s made it this far by sheer grit and determination to survive, but he runs into another hurdle when he finds that his country of refuge won’t recognize him as a refugee. Thus begins the spirit-breaking process of applications, rejections, appeals, and so forth — all while living in poverty.

Kiwan is desperate to start a new life in Belgium, so it’s a cruel irony when his wallet — his only memento of his mother — gets stolen by a girl named Marie, played by Choi Sung-eun (Sound of Magic). Marie has everything Kiwan wants: Belgian citizenship, financial security, a concerned father, but unlike Kiwan, she has completely given up on life after her own tragic circumstances. Trauma has a way of bringing the unlikeliest people together, and despite the rocky beginning, the two of them will depend on each other to find their own way of survival.

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The teaser is dark, showing us life in Belgium through Kiwan’s eyes. He’s told that a refugee application will take two months to process, but when he asks what he is supposed to do in the meantime, he’s given the polite, but unhelpful advice to “hang in there.” For Kiwan, hanging in there looks like collecting recycling and sleeping in bathrooms, laundromats, or wherever he can lay his head. Things take a further turn for the worse meets his unrepentant wallet-thief Marie at the police station, who coolly tells him she doesn’t remember what she did with it.

But it looks like Kiwan’s story strikes a chord with Marie, since, in the next scene, she shares how she also doesn’t have a mother. We then get cuts of their complicated relationship: Kiwan stops Marie from self-harm, Marie pleads for the embassy not to deport Kiwan, and Marie’s father — played by Jo Han-Chul (Gyeongseong Creature) — warns Kiwan to stay away from his “unstable” daughter.

And after many fraught scenes of fighting, we end on Kiwan and Marie looking into each other’s eyes while he narrates in voiceover: Does someone like me even deserve to be happy?

Written and directed by Kim Hee-jin, My Name is Loh Kiwan will drop on March 1 on Netflix.