Gim Gyu-min

By Kim Se-jeong



Gim Gyu-min, 43, is a North Korean defector and a film director committed to telling stories of horrendous human rights violations in North Korea.



His most recent work, "First Step," a documentary featuring advocacy work by North Korean human rights activists from North Korea, premiered in Seoul on Saturday.



Among his previous works was "Crossing" (2008), starring Cha In-pyo who played a defector father settling in the South and unsuccessfully attempted to bring his family to the South _ which drew more than one million viewers. Part of its success can be attributed to Gim who as an assistant director took care of details based on his own experience in a concentration camp and during his defection through Mongolia to the South.



Beside "First Step," he is also working on a series of five short films, "Winter Butterflies," inspired by horrific stories he himself witnessed in the North, the country he left in 2001. The first film in the series which came out in 2013 depicted a mother who kills her son due to extreme hunger.



"I am sure this is a shocking story to many. When I was in North Korea, it wasn't anything shocking. It was normal because you see them often. Only after I settled in South Korea, I realized things like that should not happen in the human world," Gim said in a recent interview with The Korea Times.



North Korean suffered severe famine in the 1990s. And the regime in North Korea has been failing in feeding its people, instead using the money to develop nuclear weapons.



Seventeen years into his film career, Gim mastered techniques of storytelling of the lives of North Koreans but is frustrated with South Koreans' lack of interest in the North Korean human rights issue.



"I think the North Korean human rights issue is politicized in the South, used by politicians and activists who need it to gain power or win money, but in the end they're not genuinely interested in the topic."



He feels that more poignantly when he reaches out for fundraising and to movie theaters to screen his movies and when his fillms are invited for screening overseas.



"The first Winter Butterfly series was invited to screen in Switzerland at the UN. It moved many people. From then, the work was screened in the U.S., Canada, Japan, Spain and Hong Kong. I asked myself; why do so many people want to watch this outside of Korea but so few in Korea want to watch? Are they so fed up with these stories that they just deny it or what?



Luckily, the struggle hasn't made him give up on his commitment.



"What I do is stay with people who're interested, get motivated and continue my work," Gim said.



What also keeps him going is his memory of dire situations in the North and the fact that his family and friends suffered and are still suffering, a lot.



Born into a middle-class family in southern North Korea close to the South Korean border, Gim was a literary boy good at writing poems. He had the desire for acting but it never took off. He studied literature at university and was groomed to be a teacher.



He grew up listening to South Korean radio as a boy and that turned him into a dissident of the regime.



"I didn't know what listening to the radio was doing to me. But it unconsciously shaped my thoughts different from others who didn't listen."



He quit university and later destroyed a polling box during an election which got him a death sentence in an open execution. He tried to kill himself unsuccessfully and ran away from the hospital during treatment, heading to the South. He fled to China but was repatriated. In the concentration camp, he made his second attempt to escape and succeeded.



His actions cost his family dearly. His parents lost their jobs and were forced to move to a third location for having a dissident son, and his brother never got out of the military _ he later heard all his family members were killed. He arrived in the South in 2001 through Mongolia.



He pursued his dream of acting at Hanyang University from 2002 but changed his mind at the recommendation of his professor and set his course for directing.



Gim said there are so many tragic stories from North Korea which South Koreans should not turn their backs against.



"When Kim Jong-il died, I saw so many people in South Korea going crazy about the news. Three million died of hunger and people are still dying. They're also people. Please don't forget them."





