Every year, poverty-stricken North Koreans risk their lives crossing the border into China to escape the repression and starvation plaguing their hermit homeland.
The price of failure is steep. Getting caught in the North can mean execution or forced labor in one of the nation's notorious gulags. A similar fate awaits those who make it across the Tumen and Yalu rivers into China. If discovered by authorities there, escapees are handed over to North Korea.
But while the plight of defectors has been reported by international media, public interest seems strangely subdued in neighboring South Korea — which accepts over 2,000 North Korean refugees each year, according to the nation's Unification Ministry — one reason filmmaker Kim Tae Kyun said he decided to direct the film "Crossing."