“I was an ordinary Pyongyang mother with a daughter,” Kim Ryun-hee recounts in “Shadow Flowers,” a documentary on her life by director Yi Seung-jun that premiered in South Korea on Wednesday. Kim, 52, was the first North Korean defector to request repatriation to the North.

“My husband was a doctor at a hospital affiliated with the Kim Chaek University of Technology, and I worked at a dress shop. I’d been having problems with my liver, and I underwent treatment in Pyongyang. But when it didn’t get better, I decided to go visit relatives in China for two months to recuperate in May 2011. The hospital costs in China were so much more expensive than in North Korea. I worked at a restaurant in China to earn money to go back to North Korea, and that’s when I met the defection broker. They told me, ‘You can earn big money working in South Korea for just a short time.’ So I handed over my North Korean passport, and by the time I thought better of it, it was already too late.”

In September 2011, Kim arrived in South Korea against her wishes, having been taken in by a defection broker. From her very first National Intelligence Service questioning upon her arrival, she has consistently demanded to be sent back, but her requests have been refused. According to the law, she is considered a citizen of the Republic of Korea, and there is no precedent of a North Korean defector being repatriated. Deciding that she needed to take action to be able to return to her family, Kim looked into smuggling and fake passports. Hoping to earn herself a deportation, she turned herself in for “espionage activities” — collecting intelligence from other defectors — and underwent punishment.

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In March 2016, Kim visited the Vietnamese embassy to apply for asylum. “I asked them to send me to North Korea, but they refused. Based on that and messages I had written about North Korea on Facebook and other places, the Daegu District Prosecutors’ Office indicted me without questioning in December of last year for violating the National Security Act,” she explained. “The trial was supposed to take place in January, but it’s been indefinitely postponed. I got my passport in May 2018, but I’ve been under an exit ban for three years for ‘violating the National Security Act.’”

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A Finnish documentary filmmaker and acquaintance of [documentary director] Yi’s twice received permission from North Korean authorities to shoot in Pyongyang, with scenes showing Kim’s family members eating meals and going about their lives as they await her return. “People in North Korea and defectors from North Korea are very ordinary people going about their lives just like us,” Yi said.

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On the topic of the Pyongyang scenes, Kim was asked whether her husband’s job as a doctor meant that they were part of the middle class. “We weren’t middle class,” she replied. “Unlike the South, doctors in North Korea are just government employees.” “I made more money than my husband working at a dress shop,” she added.

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“I hope to see the South Korean government be more charitable in their approach now,” Yi said. “It seems like they worry that if they repatriate her, it will be exploited for propaganda for the North Korean regime. But couldn’t they just say, ‘So be it’?”

“They also said that if they send Kim Ryun-hee back, other North Korean defectors will also want to be sent back, but that’s the humanitarian thing to do: hold reviews and send back the people who really want to go.”

As the interview finished up, Kim noted, “I see a lot of negative posts calling the director a ‘commie’ and whatnot.” “I’d like to ask those people what they would do if their family member was being held in the North. I hope they’ll see it as the story of a mother who wants to go back to her family.”

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