“My Name Is Loh Kiwan”—A refugee’s winter crossing into love, dignity, and the right to one’s own name
Introduction
The first time I watched him shiver in a Brussels public restroom, I realized this wasn’t a survival thriller—it was a soul’s paperwork being stamped (or denied) one breath at a time. Have you ever stood somewhere new and felt your whole identity questioned by the air itself? My Name Is Loh Kiwan makes that feeling visceral, tracking a North Korean defector and a Korean-Belgian woman who’ve both run out of road—and then find each other anyway. The film aches with small humiliations: shoes tossed in a pond, a wallet that is more than money, the silence of a courtroom that doesn’t believe you. Yet it also glows with impossible warmth, the kind that sneaks up in shared meals, in a hand held steady, in the moment someone says your name and means you. By the end, you don’t just want to know whether he gets asylum—you want him to find a home.
Overview
Title: My Name Is Loh Kiwan (로기완)
Year: 2024
Genre: Drama, Romance
Main Cast: Song Joong-ki, Choi Sung-eun, Jo Han-chul, Kim Sung-ryung, Lee Sang-hee, Seo Hyun-woo, Lee Il-hwa, Waël Sersoub
Runtime: 133 minutes
Streaming Platform: Netflix
Director: Kim Hee-jin
Overall Story
He begins not in Europe but in a northern Chinese border town where birthdays are whispered, and the wind carries sirens. Loh Kiwan, hiding from police attention after defending a coworker, waits inside while his mother washes dishes in a restaurant that has become their whole world. A raid erupts; mother and son sprint into a snowfall that steals sound, and tragedy strikes in the street. In the wreckage, an uncle makes a ruthless decision to turn death into passage money, pressing a blood-stained wallet and a plane ticket into Kiwan’s hands. That wallet isn’t just cash; it is a last tie to family, to dignity, to the wish that he live openly. With that wish folded against his chest, he boards a flight to Belgium.
Brussels greets him with damp cold and an asylum process that speaks French, Dutch, and legalese—but not grief. He files for refugee status and is told to wait, to prove himself, to return with more documents than a fugitive life could possibly produce. With no work permit and no money, he collects bottles for coins, eats what he can scavenge, and sleeps in public toilets because they’re the only heated rooms that don’t ask for papers. At a pond, a local gang stuffs his shoes into the water as if to drown the last proof that he has walked this far. In a laundromat, exhaustion folds him in a corner—an unguarded moment that changes everything.
Enter Marie, once a promising national-level shooter, now drifting through Brussels with a needle’s gravity and a gambler’s leash. She sees a vulnerable stranger and lifts his wallet, not knowing it’s the final gift from a dead mother; he chases, they end up at a police station, and something fragile shifts when she realizes what she stole. The film doesn’t romanticize this encounter; it lets shame, anger, and recognition sit in the same frame. Marie’s world is crumbling too—her mother gone, her father a wound she can’t stop touching, her talent commodified in rigged underground matches. Watching her, “mental health counseling” stops sounding like a buzzword and starts feeling like a lifeline someone forgot to throw. Two damaged lives start orbiting, almost against their will.
Marie tries to get the wallet back from the bar owner who now holds it as collateral; debts, in this city, become cages with neon signs. She bargains her marksmanship for Kiwan’s keepsake, promising a win in a fixed contest, and it’s here the movie braids survival with love. Meanwhile, Marie’s estranged father quietly finds Kiwan a job at a meat-packing plant—an industrial purgatory where the air is steam and brine—and a colleague named Seon-ju offers him a cot, soup, and the first soft questions he’s heard in months. For a little while, he has a routine: wake, work, study phrases that might convince a judge he is who he says he is. The wallet’s absence throbs, but human kindness begins to stitch him together.
The asylum interviews are clinical but cutting. An interpreter suggests the court needs stronger proof that he’s North Korean, not a Chinese-Korean trying to “game the system,” and the line lands like an accusation inside his rib cage. Have you ever been asked to prove your pain with documents you could never have carried while running for your life? The film lingers on his silence, on the way he watches doors close and rehearses his story for them anyway. “Immigration lawyer” is the kind of phrase Americans associate with fees and forms; here, it floats like a prayer he can’t afford to say out loud. Hope becomes a discipline.
Violence keeps intruding—the ambushes by bored youths, the factory’s hazards, Marie’s dealers tightening their grip when she won’t hit the bull’s-eye they’ve already sold. One night, Kiwan gets tangled in a street altercation that snowballs into arrest, and with it, the asylum case grows precarious. At court, the coworker who once promised to vouch for him lies to protect other undocumented workers, and you see in his eyes the stoicism of someone accustomed to losing. A bureaucratic shrug can undo months of hunger. Marie, torn between withdrawal and loyalty, bails him out and clings to the promise of returning that wallet—as if repairing that loss could repair herself.
The rigged match becomes a crucible. Marie wants out; her handler wants one more performance; Kiwan just wants the wallet because it holds his mother and his past and the person he is still trying to be. The scene’s tension isn’t just about a target; it’s about whether love can be collateral. When Marie defies the script, the underworld answers with knives and guns, and Kiwan’s hearing collides with a rescue—he walks out of the waiting room to haul the woman he loves back from a cliff. He chooses her over the state’s timetable, a decision that would feel reckless if it didn’t feel so true. Some debts you pay with presence.
After the chaos, the path narrows. Marie’s father arranges a way out; borders become both danger and deliverance. Airport goodbyes are rarely cinematic in real life, but theirs is a quiet explosion—two people promising not certainty but endurance. Kiwan returns to the grind of proof-gathering and interviews; Seon-ju’s parcel lands like a miracle, containing a scrap of verification that finally pierces official doubt. The court relents at last: refugee status granted. In a different movie, that stamp would be the ending; here, it’s a door.
A letter follows—a simple note to Marie’s father explaining that papers are not the same as belonging. He acknowledges the truth many migrants learn the hard way: rights don’t always travel with you, and starting over can mean starting from nothing again. But the film has taught him something too: home is a who before it’s a where. When he can, he crosses a border to find her—an image of running, not from police this time, but toward a future the two of them are just brave enough to imagine. The reunion doesn’t erase trauma; it proves that love can carry it. My Name Is Loh Kiwan ends not with victory music but with a breath that finally fills the chest.
What lingers is the sociology beneath the love story: how asylum systems sift truth with imperfect sieves; how gig economies feed on the undocumented; how a city can be both predator and shelter. If you’ve ever googled “refugee rights” out of outrage and then felt helpless, this movie makes that search less abstract. It reminds us that behind case numbers are people who laugh, crave hot soup, and save up for day passes on public transit. And it insists that compassion is policy’s missing clause. Have you ever needed a stranger to choose you? This is a film about what happens when they do.
Highlight Scenes / Unforgettable Moments
The Snowstorm Chase: The opening escape through Yanji’s alleys is breathless and intimate—mother and son threading between dumpsters, boots sliding on ice, a truck’s horn slicing the cold. The sudden impact is filmed with un-showy cruelty; you feel the world recalibrate around loss. The uncle’s grim errand the next day—turning a body into airfare—lands like a moral body blow. It’s the first time the film shows how survival often taxes the living. You learn immediately that mercy won’t arrive clean.
The Public Restroom Shelter: Kiwan locking himself in a stall to sleep is a small, devastating portrait of immigration limbo. The camera studies fluorescent light, hand dryers, the tiled anonymity of a space meant for passing through. He’s not a victim in the frame; he’s an organizer of minutes, rationing warmth. It’s impossible not to think of “travel insurance” ads and laugh bitterly—here, there is no policy for this kind of exposure. The scene teaches you the film’s language: quiet, patient, unblinking.
The Laundry Confrontation: Marie’s theft collides with Kiwan’s collapse in a coin-op laundromat that hums like a heart under strain. What could be a tropey “meet-ugly” is instead a study in shame and shock; neither character has the energy to perform. At the police station afterward, when she learns what the wallet means, her face shifts in micro-movements—resentment, pity, self-disgust. You sense a door crack open. The movie trusts us to notice.
The Factory and Seon-ju’s Table: The meat-packing floor is all condensation and knives, but dinner at Seon-ju’s place is steam from a soup pot and a child’s giggle in the next room. The contrast makes the kindness feel Herculean. When Kiwan asks why someone with steady pay still “has to steal,” the answer widens the film’s canvas: papers, leverage, fear. It’s an ethics seminar disguised as neighborly gossip. Warmth, at last, has a smell—garlic, broth, relief.
The Hearing That Waits for No One: Bureaucracy is suspenseful here; a judge, an interpreter, a question about birthplace—every syllable is a gate. As Marie spirals elsewhere, Kiwan senses danger and stands up, leaving his future on a wooden bench to go find her. Love as triage: he chooses a person over a verdict. The film refuses to punish or reward him immediately; it simply shows the cost. His chair, empty in that room, is a wound.
The Rigged Shot: Marie steps to the line, the crowd a murmur of bettors who think they already know the outcome. The target downrange is really Kiwan’s past; hitting it means buying back the wallet that holds his mother. When she defies the game, violence follows—knives flashing, an arm bloodied by an arrow, a scramble through back rooms and alleys. Kiwan arrives breathless, and together they run—not from each other this time, but side by side. If you’ve ever felt a bad contract loosen its grip, you’ll feel it here.
The Letter and the Run: A year later, a quiet letter to Marie’s father reframes “winning.” Refugee status arrives, finally, but papers are not the point; the point is the person he crosses a border to reach. Their reunion is not fireworks; it’s a long exhale. The camera watches them run toward each other like people who have learned what every step costs and are willing to pay anyway. It’s the softest triumph.
Memorable Lines
“The money in that wallet came from selling my mother’s body.” – Loh Kiwan, naming the cost of survival A shocking sentence that snaps Marie—and us—awake. It reframes theft as desecration, debt as grief. The line also underlines how migration forces indecent bargains; love for a parent becomes airfare. From here on, the wallet is not a prop but a shrine that drives the plot.
“If he goes back to where he came from, he’ll die.” – Marie, to anyone who will listen What sounds like melodrama is simply logistics for a defector. The sentence is a plea disguised as a statement, and it reveals her shift from self-absorption to advocacy. It’s also the closest the movie gets to a policy argument: deportation can be a death sentence. In her mouth, “refugee rights” becomes personal.
“My name is Loh Kiwan.” – A declaration in rooms that keep asking for proof The title line works like a thesis across interviews, checkpoints, and courts. Identity here isn’t a passport; it’s a testimony you have to deliver cleanly while exhausted. Every repetition gathers more courage—and more heartbreak—until saying the name is an act of resistance. By the end, it also becomes an invitation for love to meet him where the state would not.
“I don’t need a country; I need a home.” – Kiwan, choosing a person over a permission slip This sentiment crystallizes the film’s moral center. The refugee stamp matters, but it’s not the summit; belonging is. It’s why he leaves safety to rescue Marie, and why he later crosses a border to find her. The line transforms paperwork into prologue.
“Win it for him, and then win yourself back.” – Marie to her own reflection before the match It’s not spoken aloud in a pep-talk cliché; it’s a vow we catch in her tightened jaw, in the way she grips the pistol. The scene tells us that agency can start as a whisper, especially after addiction has stolen your voice. By tethering the shot to Kiwan’s memory wallet, the film turns sport into sacrament. What she aims at, finally, is freedom.
Why It's Special
Snow flurries swirl across Brussels as a man with a battered coat steps off a bus, clutching a memory more than a wallet. That is how My Name Is Loh Kiwan begins to burrow under your skin—not with spectacle, but with the soft ache of a life starting from zero. From its first minutes, this Netflix original frames exile and hope as intimate, everyday acts: warming your hands at a café heater, fumbling with a new language, deciding to trust a stranger. It’s streaming now on Netflix, making it easy to discover this quietly devastating story wherever you are.
The film follows Loh Kiwan, a North Korean defector who reaches Belgium with little more than resolve, and Marie, a Korean-Belgian former athlete who has misplaced her will to live. Their first encounter isn’t meet‑cute; it’s bruised, messy, and edged with survival. The movie’s power comes from the way it sits with small decisions—whether to ask for help, whether to forgive yourself—until those moments feel as suspenseful as any chase. Have you ever felt this way, pausing at a threshold because stepping through might change who you are?
What sets My Name Is Loh Kiwan apart is its genre blend. It’s not simply a refugee drama or a romance; it’s a story about dignity—how love can be a shelter without becoming an escape hatch. Director Kim Hee‑jin resists melodramatic shortcuts, instead letting glances and silences do the heavy lifting. Even when the city is cold, the camera looks for warmth: the steam of soup, sunlight on tram windows, the exhausted tenderness of two people choosing to keep going.
The writing, adapted from Cho Hae‑jin’s novel I Met Loh Kiwan, feels lived‑in rather than literary. You sense the book’s bones in the film’s empathy for outsiders, yet the screenplay pares away subplots to stay with Kiwan and Marie’s fragile bond. It’s a rare adaptation that preserves the source’s moral curiosity: What does safety cost? How much of the past do we owe to the future?
Emotionally, the movie is a long, steady exhale. Instead of wrenching sobs, it offers the slow thaw of guilt and grief, especially in how Kiwan questions whether he deserves happiness. That hesitation becomes the film’s heartbeat: every tentative smile feels earned, every setback hurts because it could have been avoided if the world were kinder. The romance arrives like weather—gradually, then all at once—without erasing the bureaucracy and bleakness around them.
Performance and direction work in lockstep. The camera lingers at human height, watching characters decide and un‑decide, stumble and apologize. Dialogue is spare, so faces carry the freight: a micro‑flinch when a door closes, a half‑breath before a confession. Even the soundscape—boots on slush, murmured French, the hiss of radiators—keeps you grounded in Kiwan’s new world, where every ordinary sound means he’s still here.
And then there’s the quiet audacity of hope. The film understands that paperwork can be a plot, that a waiting room can be an arena, that a signature can be a miracle. In a media landscape that often turns displacement into a headline or a twist, My Name Is Loh Kiwan insists on the slow work of staying alive, and the radical idea that love is more than electricity—it is endurance.
Popularity & Reception
Soon after its March 2024 premiere, My Name Is Loh Kiwan became one of Netflix’s most‑watched non‑English films that week, rising to the top of the platform’s global chart and appearing across scores of country Top 10 lists. That surge wasn’t fueled by hype alone; word of mouth drew viewers toward a story that feels timely without being didactic.
Critics and fans didn’t always agree—and that friction made the conversation richer. Some reviewers admired the film’s empathy and performances, while others wished it spent less time on romance and more on the thorny mechanics of asylum. Depending on what you seek—a human connection, or a procedural—your response might tilt one way or the other.
Audience chatter online gravitated toward the palpable chemistry between the leads and the film’s final stretch, which many called cathartic. Even viewers who debated the genre balance tended to praise how Brussels is used not as a postcard, but as an emotional climate: dim hostels, fluorescent offices, bridges that look beautiful and lonely at once.
Aggregators reflect the split reception: critics landed around the middle while viewers skewed more favorable, a gap that often appears when a movie’s tenderness resonates beyond traditional yardsticks. That divergence has kept the film in circulation long after release, as new viewers arrive through recommendations rather than hype cycles.
Industry peers also took notice. At Korea’s major film honors the following spring, Lee Sang‑hee’s turn earned a supporting‑actress win, a sign that even skeptics of the romance thread recognized the movie’s textured character work. Awards don’t settle debates, but they do spotlight where a film’s craft is undeniable.
Cast & Fun Facts
Song Joong‑ki plays Loh Kiwan with a restraint that invites you to lean in. His physicality—tight shoulders, careful steps—tells you as much as any line about someone guarding the little he has left. When he finally allows softness to surface, it’s never “performance”; it feels like a person choosing, again, to be human.
Off‑screen, Song spoke openly about why the film mattered to him: he initially hesitated over the romance but returned to the script later, realizing how the story’s compassion had deepened in his mind. That ambivalence becomes a virtue in his portrayal; you can feel the character negotiate with hope, wary but unwilling to give up on himself.
Choi Sung‑eun makes Marie unforgettable, not because the role is flamboyant, but because it’s precise. She renders a woman caught between shame and survival; the way she avoids eye contact, then holds it a beat too long, sketches a life lived on thin ice. Her scenes with Song are anchored by stillness, as if both characters are afraid of scaring away the first safe feeling they’ve had in years.
Marie’s backstory—as a former shooting athlete whose aim has deserted her in life—could have tipped into cliché. Choi refuses that path. Instead, she threads the character with flashes of humor and hard‑won self‑respect, turning a potential archetype into someone who surprises you, and herself, by choosing repair over ruin.
Lee Sang‑hee is a quiet revelation as Seon‑ju, a fellow migrant who understands the bureaucracy and the loneliness that come with it. Her presence reframes the story: this isn’t just Kiwan and Marie against the world; it’s a mosaic of people making do, sharing tips, and lending courage in hallways that echo with fluorescent fatigue.
That lived‑in authenticity earned Lee Sang‑hee a major supporting‑actress win the following year, a nod to how her performance anchors the film’s community of survivors. Awards can’t capture everything, but they can recognize the truth of a character who sees another’s pain and answers with action.
Jo Han‑chul brings layered tenderness to Marie’s father, a man balancing love with limits. He embodies that parental calculus—how to protect an adult child without smothering her, how to forgive when you’re also grieving. In a movie about crossing borders, his scenes remind us that some borders run through families.
Jo’s gift here is modulation: even in brief appearances, he suggests decades of history through a look or a pause. He doesn’t upstage the lead pair; he enlarges the stakes around them, showing what must be risked, and what might be repaired, if they choose to try.
Writer‑director Kim Hee‑jin steers the adaptation with a debut’s boldness and a veteran’s patience. She keeps the camera where choices happen—at service counters, on winter sidewalks, in cramped kitchens—and trusts the audience to meet the story halfway. That trust pays off; the film lingers because it respects how change actually feels.
Conclusion / Warm Reminders
If you’ve ever stood at a life crossroads, wondering whether you’re allowed to seek joy after loss, My Name Is Loh Kiwan will feel like a hand on your shoulder. Stream it on Netflix when you’re ready for a story that whispers rather than shouts, and then sticks with you the next morning. It might even spark unexpected searches—how an immigration lawyer might navigate a case like Kiwan’s, whether travel insurance would bring peace of mind on your next journey, or how an international money transfer becomes a lifeline when home is elsewhere. Above all, it will make you believe that tenderness is not a luxury—it’s a plan for survival.
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