Geneva, 1933. A young Austrian woman meets a Korean exile politician at the League of Nations assembly and follows him into exile — through Vienna, Moscow, Hawaii and wartime America — until she stands beside him as Korea’s first First Lady. Half a century later she tells her whole story for the first time, to a journalist from Vienna.
He will become one of the most contested figures in modern Korean history. This film tells the fifteen years before that. And it does not tell them from his side.
Vienna, 1990. Magazine editor Erika wants to add one almost forgotten woman to her International Women’s Day feature: an Austrian who became the first First Lady of Korea. She travels to Seoul and meets ninety-year-old Hanni Schneider-Choi, who gives no interviews — until Erika returns an old photograph to her, one that already connected the two of them decades earlier during a brief encounter at Vienna airport. Over ginseng tea and candied apricots, Hanni begins to talk.
The daughter of a soda-water manufacturing family near Vienna, Hanni travels to Geneva with her mother in the early nineteen-thirties. In the overcrowded grand hotel, the Korean Dr. Igeon Choi is seated at her table — an independence campaigner fighting for attention for his Japanese-occupied country, and shadowed by agents. Curiosity turns into closeness, and a waltz in the ballroom into a love that breaks every social expectation.
For years, letters hold the two together. Igeon comes to Vienna, asks for Hanni’s hand and — against her mother’s resistance — gradually wins over the family. Hanni leaves behind her home, her sisters and her old life, and from then on shares Igeon’s path: New York, Korean community life in Hawaii, thinly attended lecture tours across North America, and the book Japan Inside Out, at first a failure.
In wartime Washington, Igeon becomes a voice people want to hear — and Hanni turns from wife into fellow campaigner. She sees through the surveillance of their apartment. She performs a staged argument for a Soviet agent. She becomes part of the plan that carries Igeon’s radio addresses as far as Manchuria and Korea.
In 1948, hand in hand, Hanni and Igeon step onto the stage of an independent Korea before jubilant crowds. Back in the present, Hanni closes her box of keepsakes: she stayed because she loved him — that is all. At dawn she dances alone in the snow-covered courtyard, and once more the young Igeon offers her his hand.
Hanni is not remembered because she was a politician. She is remembered because she stood beside one. This film is about what lies behind that sentence.
She is the one who finds the listening device. She is the one who performs the argument. She is the one who becomes part of a plan nobody asked her to join. A young woman who followed a man across the world turns into someone his cause cannot function without — and it does not happen in one scene. It happens across ten years.
Vienna is the home she leaves. Korea is the home she chooses without ever having been born there. Between them lies half a life.
The film does not have to decide what Igeon Choi finally was. It has to make clear why she stayed.
A love across cultures and continents; the price a woman pays for it, and her often overlooked share in a great life’s work. Exile, home and homesickness — condensed into recurring motifs: the dance in the snow from the first image to the last, the candied apricots against homesickness, the sauerkraut that reminds Igeon of kimchi. And Betty’s image of the cheese, which the world had merely shaken long enough for two things to set into one.
A framed narrative told in flashback: the present in Seoul and Vienna in 1990 — and an encounter in 1965 — encloses Hanni’s life from 1933 to the founding of the state in 1948. The stations are Geneva, Vienna, Moscow, New York, Honolulu, Washington with the US lecture tour, and Seoul.
An intimate historical epic with the pull of a great love story. The scale is international, the perspective is private. Politics, exile and history surround Hanni — but the audience experiences them through a woman trying to understand the man beside her, and the extraordinary life the two of them have chosen.
HANNI is an equal co-production between Austria and South Korea. RitzlFilm in Vienna and G300 Entertainment in Seoul finance in equal parts; the film shoots in both countries with crew from both.
Korea gained its independence in 1945. The first First Lady of an independent Korea was an Austrian woman: Franziska Donner-Rhee. She was Korea’s first foreign First Lady – and to this day the only one. HANNI is inspired by her story; the film’s characters, names and plot are freely invented.