Young North Korean Escapees Documented In ‘School For Defectors’

Imagine living in the dictatorship of North Korea, hungry all the time, laboring for no pay. You decide to try to escape into China, dodging bullets or the possibility of forced repatriation. Eventually, somehow, you make it to South Korea, only to find that people there treat you with contempt. Your child, too, faces similar stigma.

This is the reality explored in the documentary School for Defectors, which just made its world premiere at the True/False festival in Columbia, MO. It’s directed by Emmy-nominated filmmaker Jeremy Workman (Secret Mall Apartment, Lily Topples the World).

“There’s a lot of prejudice,” directed towards defectors, Workman said at a Q&A following the world premiere. “There’s a lot of bias, as you saw in the film. The word ‘defector’ in Korean language actually has negative connotation. So, it’s an interesting situation.”

The documentary focuses on the Jangdaehyun School in Busan where the small student body – only 20 kids – are all defectors. Some were born in North Korea and taken along as a parent made their escape. Others were born in some transit point, in China, for instance, where escapees have no legal status. The school administrators and staff try to help these students adjust and see a future for themselves despite the societal rejection they experience.

“Kind of hanging over them is this really deep and kind of horrible, grotesque thing, this responsibility that’s over them. So, you felt it. You felt the weight of the world with them,” Workman commented. “But what was so fascinating at the school, particularly these teachers, was that they sort of understood that and they created this space for them where they felt like they could be their best selves and they could discover themselves. And as you saw, it wasn’t so much about grades. It was a different [measure] of success. It was about finding themselves and that sort of drove how we thought about the movie.”

Teachers do an exercise with the kids, who are high school age, asking them to imagine their lives in 10 years. That becomes a recurring them in the film.

“They were invited to follow their dreams, which was something that in totalitarian governments, North Korea, is just something that’s unheard of. You would never even use that language. I just thought that was so powerful,” Workman said. “For these kids, I think the first step for them is really imagining a future for them, imagining their own identity.”

The filmmaker said he was struck by a spirit of solidarity among the students.

“It’s like this camaraderie where they’re all sort of rooting for each other,” Workman observed. “That was something you noticed immediately — it was this group and they were all about each other and they’re all supportive of each other. It was amazing. For me, it was like they were like chicks. They were like little chicks that were like starting to walk.”

Workman filmed with all 20 students.

“We had an entirely Korean crew. I was the only one who wasn’t Korean. And I also was one of the camera people. That, I think, was very important because it set the tone that we were all in there together with them. There was no director looking at a monitor,” he said. “As our team, we didn’t want to do that thing where we chose, ‘Oh, these are the three people that we would focus on.’ We were like, ‘We’re filming the entire school.’”

He added, “They all knew that at any time they could ask us to leave, they could always sort of ask us to turn off the cameras. We just kind of followed with them and let them feel like they were participating and very much were in the process of the making of the movie. I would show them cuts of the movie, I would show them clips of the movie, I would let them hold the camera, all these kind of little things just to, again, make it so that it was an experience for them that they felt they wanted to participate, not that they were sort of asked to do.”

Workman’s 2024 film, Secret Mall Apartment (executive produced by Jesse Eisenberg) became a breakout hit and is streaming on Netflix. School for Defectors, with its endearing cast of students and empathic educators, is also resonating with audiences, to judge from the response at True/False. In an email just before the festival began, Workman summed up the film this way: “It’s an intimate, character-driven story about youth, resilience, and possibility.”