Geneva, 1933. A young Viennese woman meets a Korean independence leader who has no country to return to. She follows him into exile — and never comes home.
Seoul, 1990. In a walled house above the old city, an Austrian journalist sits across from a woman of ninety who speaks Korean with her neighbours and has not used her mother tongue in decades. Erika has come to write this woman’s life. By the end, she is no longer certain she has the right to.
Geneva, 1933. Hanni Schneider — thirty-three, four languages, the youngest of three daughters of a Viennese soda-water manufacturer — is seated at a hotel table beside a delegate nobody invited: Igeon Choi, who petitions the League of Nations on behalf of a country that has been erased from the map. They speak German to one another. He offers her something her world does not contain — a cause larger than a life.
She says yes. Against her mother, against her class, against reason. At Vienna’s Westbahnhof her mother tells her she can always come home. She never does.
Honolulu. New York. Washington. Hanni learns to make kimchi, and learns to be spoken about in the third person in her own living room. She also learns that exile is not a quiet condition: a man in a grey suit in Geneva; a manuscript that is not in the car when the knife comes out in Chicago; a single hair wedged between door and frame in an apartment that turns out to be listening. It is Hanni who finds it. It is Hanni who sets the trap.
Then liberation comes. And the presidency, the war, the residence — and the slow turning of the man she followed into a man she can no longer recognise. She keeps everything she gave everything up for. And she keeps it alone.
HANNI is an equal co-production between Austria and South Korea. RitzlFilm and G300 Entertainment finance in equal parts; the film shoots in both countries with crew from both.
HANNI is inspired by the true story of the Viennese woman Franziska Donner and the Korean independence leader Syngman Rhee. The film’s characters, names and plot are freely invented.