Hey. Well, thank you for staying
and thank you for your
movie. It is extraordinary.
Thank you so much.
And thank you for doing this.
And also, thank you for being named
Madeleine.
You too. Such a unique name.
So you were originally going to make
a movie, an entirely different movie
about the woman who is featured in
your movie, who wrote the
memoir, her own son,
Lee.
Hope I'm pronouncing that correctly.
Yes. So and it's turned
into this other movie.
How did that happen?
Yeah. So initially
I was approached by my producers.
They had acquired the rights to the
until Lee's memoir, The Girl with
Seven Names, and
she had defected more than 20 years
previous.
I read it.
It was, you know, haunting.
It was beautiful.
It was it began to open up a
world that I didn't really know.
And what it really did was it, you
know, intrigued me to look further.
And I, I started
to do a deep
dive in to research with,
you know, reading everything I could
get my hands on and watching
everything. And I did this very
intense month,
several month long search into
the Internet, using
VPNs and searching in different
languages,
because I found that I could find
out different things about North
Korea, depending on where I search
from, what language I searched in.
And I discovered a couple of things
I discovered.
First off, that we don't
hear from the people of North Korea.
I discovered that I could barely
find anything that gave voice to the
26 million people inside
that country.
I also discovered hidden camera
footage that was being shot by
extremely brave North Koreans
who were literally risking their
lives, you know, shooting out of
paper bags and in their sleeves and
stuff to bring the truth
of their country out
or to smuggle it out to the outside
world. And so the gulf between the
fact that we didn't hear
from the 26 million people, and yet
I was feeling the heartbeat and
seeing the reality of these people
made me at a certain point, this was
like after three or four months of
research, say
this movie has to be made.
It's an outrage that we haven't
heard this.
And at that point, I
knew, you know,
yes, Ciancia would be a part of
this, but I also knew I wanted
to go.
Into a really deep
dive with the film and a present
tense story with the film.
So. But you needed characters.
Yeah. As we say in the biz, you
needed people to anchor your
story. How did you find them?
Well, I started off, you know,
shooting with young SEO in South
Korea. And, you know,
she agreed.
She knew that I wanted some present
tense, you know, something Really,
what I wanted was to try to follow
an escape, which sounded so insane
at the time.
But. And she and I would brainstorm.
The idea initially was to kind
of couple her with that and,
you know, her story.
What I was shooting with her was
really it was
more of a psychological thriller
about what it is like
to live as one of the most
high profile defectors in
the world who was speaking out
against the regime and was had been
a target of the regime.
And so it was sort of this deep,
dark, you know, belly
of soul. Seoul, South Korea.
That was her side.
And then I was always looking for
something else. And I think my
second or third trip to Seoul,
I read something about Pastor Kim,
and I knew I had to seek
him out. And the
irony is that it turned out
that once I met him,
which took many months
for he and I to get to know each
other and decide to work together.
But once I met him, I realized that
actually some of the hidden camera
footage I had been finding on the
web actually came from his network,
but I hadn't known that.
And so he opened things up into
a whole nother world
that, you know.
And he he connected you to
these two stories.
Yeah. So when he and I decided
to work together, which again, took
many months
because, you know, he's very
protective, as he should be of his
network and of the people he's
trying to help.
But once he and I got to know each
other and realized that we really
were interested in kind of making
the same kind of movie, he and
I both agreed that we
should follow two stories.
Two attempted escapes.
And these were the two
groups who contacted him
after that.
These were no other ones that.
You didn't know how it would turn
out. Obviously, when you began
shooting.
No, we didn't know
how it was going to turn out at all.
And that was the other thing.
Not only did we not know how it was
going to turn out, we didn't
even know if we'd be able to use the
footage, because
with the ROH family, for instance,
the brother Jang,
who was had already defected.
He's in the movies and he was living
in South Korea.
He gave initial,
you know, consent to Pastor Kim
for the network to follow
their story.
But we were never going to use their
story without them giving consent.
So my producers went crazy
when I told them that, yes,
we're going to shoot this movie.
But if the Roh family decides,
you know, at any point that they
don't want to be in this, you know,
we have nothing.
So it was really everybody.
And Pastor Kim talks about this very
beautifully, like everybody had to
kind of risk, you
know, so much.
And in the end, it's what
brought us.
Together and made us you know, these
people now are like family
to me.
And I think I mean, they'll
be a part of my life forever.
But we had.
Yeah, we had no idea.
Communicate.
We communicate.
I mean, I've learned some Korean and
actually. So Yan, the mother
is learning English rapidly.
The girls.
My daughter has been teaching them
English.
And then we communicate through our.
You know, there's a couple of
translators who are part
of our team who are with
us all the time because
the pastor, Kim and Susanne
have been in the United States most
of the last two and a half months
with us.
Do they ever worry about your
filming, putting them in greater
danger?
Yeah. So from the very beginning
that was, you know, a mandate of
mine and Pastor Kim's that
we would do nothing that would put
them at any further risk than where
they were already.
And, you know, that's why, for
instance, in China, none of
us went to China.
Obviously, China,
as you know, is complicit with North
Koreans in many, many, many ways.
Even Pastor Kim doesn't go into
China. He hasn't been in China since
2009 because he had been
warned that he could be kidnaped
into North Korea. So in
China, it was only Pastor Kim's
network shooting with flip phones.
And Pastor Kim actually does
his network always actually
shoots a little bit.
Not like what we did, but
it's not anything new for his
network to be shooting because he
is documenting stuff
along the way just for his
network to take in and out of
North Korea, because the belief
is that education,
you know, like getting
the truth of North Korea out
and also getting the truth of our
world in
is going to be the way ultimately
to bring change in North
Korea.
And aside from your movie.
How is that information getting out?
You mean so the
way the information is getting out?
Well, our movie is I mean,
really the
the biggest way so far, You know, I
mean, I got this information
by doing this incredibly intensive
dive into everything
North Korea for months.
But for any of us, I mean, on
our news, you know, basically we see
what the Kim regime wants us to see.
You know, we see news about
the missiles and the parades and
no, we don't see any of this.
So this this film
is definitely one of the main things
that is hopefully going to
get stuff out.
I mean, there are people, like I
said, shooting this hidden camera
footage and a lot of it's in the
film, But that footage
isn't necessarily getting to people
in terms of what's getting in.
There's a lot of NGOs in South
Korea, and some of them, several of
them are run by defectors.
And their whole goal is to
get, you know, flash drives
in to teach North Koreans
about the reality of the outside
world, because North Koreans
are taught that, you know,
they live in the center of
the universe, that they are
yes, their lives are hard, you
know, full of hardship.
And they know their lives aren't
easy, but they believe
that the rest of the world is
actually worse off than them,
you know, other than North Koreans
who happen to live along that
800 plus mile border
with China who may get a signal here
and there. Most North Koreans live
inland.
They don't know anything about the
outside world. And so they do assume
the outside world is worse off.
So a lot of defectors that
there's a lot of projects that are
sending flash drives
and they used to send
VHS tapes and things like that.
But one of the things that North
Korean soldiers and guards
do, they will I
mean, you know, there's not much
electricity in North Korea, but also
what they will do strategically
is turn off the electricity
in, let's say, a neighborhood.
Go into a home.
They don't have to ask.
Go into a home.
And if you were watching a VHS tape,
your electricity is off.
You can't get that tape out.
Yeah. And they go in to find
those tapes. And if you're caught
with a tape, that's it.
So that's why they start moving to
flash drives. So.
But do they have the Internet?
No, no, no.
No access.
At all? No, no, no, no.
They now have something
called the intranet.
Like they have some they're trying
to do their own version of
sort of not really like of social
media, but not.
No, they do not.
Does the regime does.
Yes, but no, they do
not have Internet at all.
No. So here we are all wondering how
they were able to hack Sony.
And, well, that's the regime.
The regime has a very, very
sophisticated.
Very small group of people were
able to do that.
Yeah.
Yeah. They have very skilled
people in that.
So there's a very poignant moment in
your movie where the the
you're interviewing the grandma and
and you're asking her about
Kim Jong un and she's
struggling and then she says she's a
great man. And her daughter says,
come on, stop, stop with the
propaganda. But at that moment, she
really did feel that, right?
Yeah. And so what was it like
trying to convince her,
meeting her, that you
weren't part of the great scene,
that you weren't going to kill her
as an American?
It was amazing.
I was unbelievable.
I mean, that and there's so
much more footage, you know,
of that time,
because in Laos, because we were
able to go to Southeast Asia, we
were not able to go to China,
obviously. But
but Laos was the first time that we
were able to kind of sit down for a
few days.
And the footage is unbelievable
with all of them.
But with grandma.
But that was such an incredible
experience because, you know, she
had for 80
years been told that
we were the enemy and she
believed it and she she still
believed it. And so
what we were witnessing was, you
know, her grappling with what she
has known to
be true, you know, literally
in her bones, known to be
true, which is that we are
not only the enemy of North Korea,
but that we only exist
to hurt North Korea.
We don't really exist as
individuals.
We don't really care about
anything other than that.
And she's known that to be true and
then kind of seeing her and
experiencing her.
Grapple with that vis
a vis her own experience
over time with us was.
Unbelievable.
And, you know, that is something
else that is unprecedented
in this film. And
at the time, like, we knew
how crazy this was, this
clash of not just cultures, but
ideologies, mythologies,
because most people who meet
defectors, they meet them after
they've been through this process
of, you know, because if you
do get to Thailand and you do
get to South Korea, you have to go
through several months of proving
that you're North Korean, because
the South Korean government doesn't
want, you know, a Vietnamese person
to pretend they're North Korean to
gain South Korean citizenship.
So you have to prove you're North
Korean.
If you prove you're North Korea.
And then you go to another facility
where you live for many months
to learn about the outside world,
learn what an ATM is and
all sorts of things.
And usually people would meet them
after that. So we
met them just.
You know, literally
weeks after they had crossed the
river into north into China.
And most of the two weeks before
we met them, they were hiding in a
in this hut in China.
So literally, we kind of
psychologically, we kind of met them
like a day after they left.
Yeah.
So had they not met that farmer,
what would have happened to them?
And they were just wandering around
for days, not knowing where they
were in China.
Yeah, well, how are they
surviving?
And I mean, they were barely
surviving. And because when
they fled, they fled, as you saw in
the film, because they knew that
they were on a list and they were
going to be banished and they knew
that was the end for them.
And so for them, it was like,
well, you know, we have
to go. And but they didn't know what
China was.
They didn't know, you know, some
defectors who I've spoken to
have the, you know, idea
that if you cross the river,
then suddenly you're
free. You know, the real family
didn't think that, but they didn't
know what.
Where they were, what was ahead of
them, or what these other countries
even were. They didn't know the
geopolitical situation at all.
If they had not met that farmer.
Probably they
would have been caught
or.
You know, sold by a broker.
But they really weren't
a great.
You know, brokers do sell
young women into
prostitution, into marriage
with you know, because in
northeastern China, there's a lot of
men, you know, farmers, men
living.
And there's not a lot of women.
You know, there's the one child
policy, you know, and and
so a lot of North Koreans are sold
to marriage or sold into
prostitution.
They're sold into sex, chatting and
that kind of thing.
But with the royal family,
probably they would have been caught
and.
And sent back.
And what would have happened to the
little kids?
Oh, they would have all been in a.
In a labor camp.
In a prison camp yard.
I mean, there's a slight chance
maybe the kids would have been out,
but probably not.
Probably not.
Which means it's a death.
This incredibly lucky.
Incredibly lucky.
How many families are
like them who are not incredibly
lucky? How many people try to make
it and don't?
What's really hard is we don't have
exact numbers because the only
numbers we have are those who make
it. You know, because we don't know
how many people are going across the
river. We know that with Kim Jong
un because he has amped
up security so much on the river
and, you know, started a shoot to
kill order also on
the river.
So we know that less people are
defecting, but we don't know how
many have made it across.
It's estimated to be, you know,
in the hundreds of thousands.
And the crazy thing is
that, you know, because some people
that are hiding in China because,
you know, not everyone is caught.
Maybe the real family would not have
been caught, but a family of five
people, that's very hard to hide
over time.
But what's
really horrible and
the Chinese government is so much a
part of this, but if you're,
let's say, a woman who
comes over the river, let's say
you get sold into marriage, it
doesn't matter if you have five
kids in China, you're
married to a Chinese man.
Let's say you have five kids.
You've lived there for 30 years.
You will never have citizenship.
You will 30 years
later if your husband's mad at you,
if your neighbor is mad at you, they
can turn you into the police and you
will be repatriated regardless of
your children.
Your children get Chinese
citizenship, but you will never get
it.
So they don't know how many, but
estimated to be hundreds of
thousands.
And it's been more difficult during
and after the pandemic.
Right. China's really crack down.
Yeah. So we were actually
in South Korea when the pandemic
hit. And I was shooting one of
the cameras with Pastor Kim when he
was getting those calls.
And yeah, the China was
paralyzed, right?
Nobody could move through China.
Even we couldn't move to China, let
alone a defector.
So defectors
who had been hiding there for a
year, a month, a day, they couldn't
move. And because the
river was shut down, really
clamped down.
It was even I mean, it was basically
impossible to and you wouldn't even
necessarily want to go cross the
river and just be in a paralyzed
China.
So everything stopped.
The network fell apart.
The part of the network that you
know, does it only for money, looked
for jobs elsewhere, the part of
the Underground Railroad that does
it for the cause.
And this part of the,
you know, more the missionary
type work.
They also had to find other
means and other ways to to,
you know, and other things to put
their attention to.
So everything was
broken down.
But over the last ten months or so,
the network has been
slowly rebuilt and roots
have been rediscovered
because the roots are always
changing.
And Pastor
Kim actually just helped
four people out in
August. And a week and a half
ago, he was he was here.
But then he went.
He was in Southeast Asia a week and
a half ago with another group.
So he was helping out.
But those are the first ones
since how.
Many Pastor Kim's are there.
It's like there needs to be more
than just one.
Yeah, there's some there
are some other organizations doing
this, but he's one of the primary
ones.
There's there's there
are some churches in
South Korea.
Everything is funded by donations.
These escaped.
So there are other churches in South
Korea that do do some of this
work. But I would say he's the most
prominent. And then there is
an organization called Liberty in
North Korea who helped us
a lot with this film, and
they also help people.
So there are others, but it's
few and far between.
And what is the attitude of the
South Korean government to his work
and to this work of trying to get
North Koreans to come?
Are they welcoming that or.
And so the South Korean government
I mean, it varies administration
to administration.
The current government is, you
know, very aligned with the United
States and Japan.
They're taking a much harder line,
a policy against North Korea.
But the previous government
was sort of trying to placate
North Korea. And when so
young son was sent back, it was the
previous government.
There is a chance that
this government might have appealed
to China for him because he was a
minor.
Whatever the moon government did
not.
But.
It really varies
administration to administration,
but also the people of South Korea.
You know, there's some people who
welcome North Koreans and see them
as you know, they are the same
people. They've been separated for
a long time, but they are the same
people.
And there are other people who
don't want to be bothered, you know.
And definitely North Koreans,
a lot of defectors have
a hard time assimilating
to life in South Korea, like
the royal family
is kind of the luckiest of the
lucky because they came as a family
and they succeeded.
But most defectors
come as one person
or maybe two, but
more likely one, and they're leaving
family behind.
And then to find themselves in South
Korea, unable
to communicate with your family,
you know, not understanding
a lot of the culture.
And depending on your
age, not even necessarily being able
to find a way to live.
Like Suellen, the mother,
she's been an activist since before
we met her.
She works with single moms
and women over the age
of like 45 who are coming
defectors who are coming to help
them assimilate. And the mother of
the family is actually training
to be a social worker to do the same
thing, because defectors, a
lot of them, have a really hard
time.
So, so young.
I was wondering, she lost her son
and she lost her mom.
Really? She lost
closest people to her.
Does she have any regrets that you
defected?
She doesn't have rats
that she defected because,
I mean, when she first went
over the river, she was not
intending to defect.
She was intending to
find a way to smuggle goods into
North Korea, because a lot of women
do do that.
And women are more responsible for
supporting the family in North Korea
than men are.
And since the 1980s, the market
economy in North Korea has
like provide like
women are basically
the ones who are smuggling goods in
for this market.
So she did not mean to defect
when she was caught and put in
prison.
When she got out two years later,
she was shunned.
She was really not able to see her
son or her mother or anyone.
And so she kind
of had no choice. So she doesn't
regret that. But she does.
Feel.
I mean, she says she feels like a
sinner, you know, just for.
What happened to her son?
The fact that she couldn't
rescue him.
And she's
you know, she's been an activist for
a long time. She's been known.
All of these people have been known
by the regime for a long time.
But this
what's going on with her son And
this film has reactivated
her. And she's doing a lot
of work protesting against the
Chinese government, the North
Korean government.
And that activism that
she's involved with now makes her
feel connected to her son.
It's like her lifeblood right
now.
Well, let's end on a an up note.
And that is enough that, I mean,
it's positive that she's turning
this into action.
But tell us about the
family, the royal family, and
how they're doing, the girls
especially.
Yeah. So they're all they're
actually all doing really well,
Mom, I said was, you know, she's
studying to be a social worker.
She's actually going to be in L.A.
late into weeks,
no less than two weeks.
Dad is working in a tofu factory.
Grandma is doing really
well. She's living with Huck Chang,
her son.
She is having some memory issues,
but she's doing really well
emotionally and enjoying
her life. And the girls are
really loving it.
And the youngest one is becoming a
very accomplished concert
pianist.
But they're both doing really well
in school. And
yeah, they're doing I mean, they
are, as I said, the luckiest of the
lucky.
Well, we lucky to have you and lucky
to see this movie.
And thank you so much.
And thank you all for coming out
tonight to all your friends, because
I think.
You so much for coming
out. And we're opening in theaters
on Friday.
Yeah. So go see it again.
Do you know anyone you think might
want to see it? We're opening It's a
very small, you know, limited
release, but we are open.