Recent Events

AFA Cinema Gateway

Seoul Train

with an appearance by the Director

Thursday, October 31, 2013
7:30 pm

Location: Santa Monica Screening Room, 1526 Fourteenth Street, Santa Monica, CA 90404 (between Broadway and Colorado)

Admission: $15.00

Parking: Street

About the Film: 

North Korea is a brutal dictatorship which is nonchalant about the lives of its citizens. Faced with an often man made famine in which hundreds of thousands have died, many North Koreans attempt to defect into neighboring China to find a way to survive. Defection, however, is a capital crime in North Korea. Nevertheless, the Chinese government systematically repatriates the defectors returning them home to imprisonment, torture and in some cases, death.

The film follows the story of the underground railroad that has developed in China in order to help the growing amounts of North Korean refugees. The official stance of the Chinese Government is that these people are not really refugees but illegal workers who are not entitled to asylum.

The film introduces us to Ki-won Chun, a pastor, who has made it his mission to help the refugees escape China into Mongolia. His mission in the film at first fails and he is arrested, then jailed. Upon his release from prison he begins to rebuild his network. Also shown is a family which attempts to escape into the Japanese Consulate and is forcibly dragged out by the Chinese police.

This important film exposes its viewers to a developing human rights crisis that could lead to the fall of the North Korean regime and a flood of refugees - not unlike the events which preceded the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.