After his cousin conspires with the Japanese occupiers to sell their crop, Song Ryul is forced to emigrate to Kando (Jiandao) in Manchuria.

The prison is raided by Kim Il Sung and his guerrillas, who free the inmates, who take revenge on the Japanese by blowing up a railway.

[4] The film opens with a quote from Victor Hugo's Les Misérables: "So long as ignorance and misery remain on Earth, books like this cannot be useless..." The opener was highly unorthodox for a North Korean film, since North Korean works of culture habitually only referenced texts written by the leader Kim Il Sung, and certainly not of foreigners.

[7] Song Ryul (played by Choe Sang-soo[8]) is a peasant studying in Seoul when he hears the news that his father is ill and he has to return to the countryside.

[7] Song's mother is attacked by a pack of rabid dogs owned by a businessman in "a horrific scene",[7][7] and has to buy medicine.

[6][11] Shin was unable to figure out how to shoot the scene with either scale models or other special effects,[7][6][12] so he jokingly asked if Kim Jong Il could supply him with a real train instead.

[6] On the one hand, Runaway conforms to well to the "juche Socialist realist standard" of North Korean film.

[17] On the other hand, Runaway retains many characteristics from Shin's early melodrama films made in the 1960s while he was still in South Korea which he used to impress the country's president Park Chung Hee.

[13] Indeed, both North and South Korean cinema shared a preoccupation with realism at the time, and in both political contexts, an authoritarian regime was hungry for the success of the cinematic arts.

The screening was initially meant to include two of his films made in North Korea: Runaway and Salt.

[21] The public prosecutor of South Korea, however, forbade the screening just one day before Runaway was to be shown to guests, on the basis of the National Security Act.

This forced the organizers to show the film as a private screening instead of their original intention of letting the general public watch it.