Young 11-year-old Jin-ho treks into the North Korean mountains every morning collecting firewood to earn just enough to keep him and his starving mother alive.
One morning, he trips and breaks his leg, leaving him unconscious for multiple days in the isolated, freezing woods. He eventually staggers home, but his injury takes him out of work, depriving him and his mother of a source for food.
For an audience detached from the agony of starvation, the horrific scenes that followed in the film “Winter Butterfly” seemed ethereal. But for director Gim Gyu-min, who defected from North Korea in 1999, those images reflected reality.
Gim lived in North Korea during the four-year famine of the 1990s, which wiped out an estimated 3 million people. He said death was so common that he became accustomed to seeing bodies piled up in the fields and roads.
“There were so many people just dying left and right from hunger that if you did not see a body that would have been a weird, unnatural thing around that time,” Gim said.
When the famine first hit, Gim recalled people caring for each other, sharing food as it began to run out. But as months rolled into years, Gim said people began to act “like animals.”
“You realized if you cared for the other person, you would end up dying.”
This desperation culminated in the final scene of Gim’s film, which premiered in the U.S. this week at The Heritage Foundation.
Disillusioned by extreme starvation, the mother brutally beats her son to death thinking he’s a dog scrounging for food and boils him to eat.
The scene, which left the audience in Heritage’s auditorium silent as the screen faded to black, was based on an experience Gim witnessed himself.
He recounted watching as North Korean agents dragged a woman in his hometown out of her house after she had eaten her own child. Strikingly, at the time, the incident did not shock him.
“During the late 90s and early 2000s, a lot of that was happening in North Korea—where people were so driven to hunger that they would resort to that sort of extreme action,” said Henry Song, a DC-based human rights activist for North Korea who was translating for Gim.
It was only after Gim had settled in South Korea and began living a normal life that he reflected on his past, realizing how “incredible” it was he had witnessed such an event.
“People ask, ‘How can such things like this happen in North Korea?’ But when you consider the fact that North Korea was, and still is, a place where it’s so closed off from the rest of the world—like a bunch of frogs in a small pond—whatever happens there, people have no realness of what the outside world is like,” Gim said.
“Therefore, the people continue to believe in the leaders Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il like they are god-like figures.”
Gim fled North Korea, increasingly discontented with the state’s evasive propaganda after listening to South Korean radio broadcasts, which heightened his awareness of the outside world.
At 25, Gim dropped out of college and escaped across the Tumen River into China. He moved to South Korea two years later.
More than a decade after his escape, Gim said the situation in North Korea is still “dire,” but signs of a regime dissolution may be showing.
“Deification of Kim Jong-un is certainly broken down,” Gim said of North Korea’s current supreme leader. “When I talk to North Korean defectors who have recently arrived in South Korea, when they talk about Kim Jong-un, they don’t use any honorifics or they basically cuss him out.”
“Even when I first resettled in South Korea, for many months I was not able to utter the name Kim Jong-il freely … without fear of anything bad happening.”
Gim hopes “Winter Butterfly” will help reveal the reality of North Korea—the world’s most isolated nation.
