My Name Is Loh Kiwan

Loh Kiwan flees North Korea after his mother's death, reaches Belgium through China, and applies for asylum. The problem is that he cannot prove who he is. There are no documents, no records, and to get refugee status he has to demonstrate that he is North Korean. Living without papers in Brussels, he meets Marie, a woman who has abandoned her own life. Kim Hee-jin directs. Song Joong-ki plays Kiwan and Choi Sung-eun plays Marie. It is a Netflix production, from a novel by Cho Hae-jin. The notable thing is that it builds the subject out of bureaucracy. The escape is over in the first half hour; the rest is filling in forms, sitting interviews, waiting for interpreters and being refused. What the asylum system does in reducing a person to a file is the actual subject. Song Joong-ki worked on the North Korean dialect for the part and speaks in it for most of the film. The Brussels material shows the city as cold and provisional rather than picturesque, which fits the point of view of the person looking at it. Who it is for: viewers who follow drama about migration and asylum, and Korean cinema. Who it is not for: the romance weakens it, the final section returns to genre shape, and the pace is slow.