In her first film lead, the "Pachinko" breakout plays a North Korean defector finding her footing in Seoul Kim Min-ha (Triple Pictures) "It didn't feel like I was reading fiction," Kim Min-ha says of the script for "Hana Korea.""It felt like reading someone's diary."She had her reasons. The film casts her as Hye-sun, a 21-year-old from North Korea's Ryanggang Province who defected to the South to pay her mother's medical bills back home. Her narrative is built around a series of letters she writes home in voice-over.Stories like Hye-sun's are hardly scarce on Korean screens, but they mostly belong to documentaries and talk shows, too often fixating on the journey out: The hardship that drives people to leave, the perilous river crossings and near-misses."Hana Korea" picks up where those stories fade out. It follows Hye-sun from an interrogation room to Hanawon — the state-run center where defectors spend their first weeks — then out into Seoul, friendly on the surface and cold underneath, where she studies to become a nurse between restaurant shifts. Kim Min-ha stars in "Hana Korea."(Triple Pictures) Danish director Frederik Solberg spent six years on the material, interviewing more than 30 defectors along the way. Kim signed on right after she read the script; it was the kind of part she gravitates toward, one she could play "with the eyes and the body more than with words."Before shooting began, Kim spent a week in Denmark with Solberg and his co-writer, Sharon Choi."We were in that office from nine to six, eating every meal together," she recalls. "We went through every last thing about Hye-sun. What habits she'd have in a given moment, the look on her face when she said a line."This one marks Kim's first leading role in a feature, but most viewers will recognize her from somewhere else.Kim broke through in 2022 as the young Sunja in "Pachinko," Apple TV+'s period epic based on the Min Jin Lee bestseller, opposite Oscar winner Youn Yuh-jung and K-drama superstar Lee Min-ho. That part, a young woman who leaves occupied Korea for Osaka and carries her family through the decades, made Kim a global name almost overnight.She has kept busy since, starring in the likes of "Light Shop" and "Typhoon Family," but for many, Sunja is still the first thing that comes to mind. And in a sense, Hye-sun isn't far off from her — another young woman alone on unfamiliar ground, another outsider getting by on grit. Kim doesn't see it that way."I thought of her as a completely different person," she says. "The outsider frame overlaps, sure. But this is about how Hye-sun finds her identity as she puts down roots in the South." Kim Min-ha stars in "Hana Korea."(Triple Pictures) Learning the North Korean accent was a job in itself. For months, from preproduction through the last day of the shoot, Kim trained with dialect coaches from Ryanggang, defectors themselves, who would tell her their own stories between lessons."I treated the dialect like sheet music, like a piece of music I have to learn. Even then, every day was a challenge," she says. "It was nothing like the North Korean speech you hear on TV. Almost the opposite." She worked out how the accent would gradually thin out as Hye-sun settles in, then let it slip back out around anyone who put her at ease.The role, by her own account, changed some of her thinking too. She'd gone in with the usual preconceptions about North Korean defectors, but the deeper she got into the work, the less distance she found between them and everyone else. "The language and the culture differ a little, and that's about it," she says. "They're people, like any of us.""This is a story about settling in, about figuring out who you are, and there's a universality to that," she says. "We all wake up, adapt to new surroundings, and work so, so hard at living. It's a story about defectors, and it's a story about all of us.""Hana Korea" opened in theaters Wednesday.