Asian Drama

“If you go to college, you can do anything”, “Okay, okay...” The high school student daughter, who used to casually brush off her mother’s nagging while driving her to school, makes a tragic decision that forever changes their lives one day. The police, investigating incidents centering around typical teenage problems, like school violence and random chatting apps, gradually uncover a twisted and distorted mother-daughter relationship, which they never suspected before as they gather testimonies from those around them.

(Source: BIFAN.kr)

Release Dates: 2022 || Jul 1, 2023 (Festival)

Duration: 1 hr. 44 min.

Content Rating: 15+ - Teens 15 or older

Cheol Soo has a perfect appearance, but he is a bit slow. One day, his daughter Saet Byeol appears in front of him. Saet Byeol has been sick and she has been in the hospital. They start on a trip.

Nestled deep in the heart of Seoul’s thriving downtown sits a curious hotel, the like of which no one has ever seen before. Old beyond measure, the building has stood for millennia, an ever-present testament to the fact that things are not always what they seem. Running this hotel is Jang Man Wol, a greedy, suspicious soul who has spent the past thousand years acting as the establishment’s CEO. Cursed for a sin she can no longer remember committing, Man Wol is doomed to spend all of the eternity running this odd establishment, catering to the needs of a most peculiar clientele. Her only hope of escape is to find someone who has committed a worse sin than her own but after a thousand years, she’s beginning to lose hope.

However, things take an interesting turn when Goo Chan Sung shows up. Once the youngest assistant manager ever to work at a multinational hotel corporation, Chan Sung finds himself forced to manage the Hotel del Luna because of a deal his father made with Man Wol years ago. A stickler for rules and regulations, he’s a perfectionist to the extreme but that may be exactly what this odd establishment and its cursed CEO needs.

Set within the frenzy world of the paparazzi media. Due to a photograph, Han Seok Joo loses everything, including his job as a photographer for a top newspaper and his family. Ji Soo Hyun is the notorious chief editor of a paparazzi group. She hires the man to become a paparazzi photographer.

Jang Doo Chil, a con artist who had been reported dead after committing a grand fraud case is rumored to be alive. A prosecutor, Park Hee Soo, who was in collusion with the con man needs to eliminate him to avoid a corruption scandal. When tracking down the con man, Hee Soo meets another fraudster named Ji Sung who is also after the same man for a personal revenge. Realizing their mutual goals, they decide to team up, but with hidden motives. They then recruit other swindlers; Suk Dong, Choon Ja, and Chief Kim, to throw bait at Jang Doo Chil's right-hand man, Seung Gun.

In 1972, the Vietnam war is coming to an end. CHOI Tae-in is plagued with feelings of guilt, losing all his men and being the sole survivor of a devastating battle. He is in the hospital recovering, but longs to return to his former unit. But the chief of the CID department orders him to lead an investigative scouting unit back in the thick of the jungle. Once again, the communication unit receives an unexplainable radio transmission from soldiers who were presumed missing and dead 6 months ago. CHOI Tae-in and his unit are sent to gather any clues as to the whereabouts of the missing unit. When the soldiers have moved on further into the jungle, the gravestone reveals its true message. "NO Return; He who sheds others' blood can not return."

Two people are brought together by their connection to a horrible event and work together to solve the case.

Choi Moo Gak lost his younger sister, Eun Seol, in a senseless killing known as the “Bar Code Murders” three years ago. Devastated by the loss, Moo Gak becomes a police officer to try to catch the perpetrator, who is still at large. He meets Oh Cho Rim, a woman who survived the event but lost her memory and acquired the unusual ability to visualize smells. Can Moo Gak and Cho Rim work together to catch the “Bar Code Murderer” and heal each other’s wounds?

Shi-Eun (Su-jeong Lim) is a woman whose love for riding horses makes her face trials and tribulations.

In the dead of winter, a screenwriter travels to his friend's closed cabin resort in the mountain with the intention of working on his script. Instead of being alone, he finds himself in the company of annoying strangers, from intrusive townsfolk who welcome themselves in to vacationing skiers who won't take no for an answer. On top of that, mysterious sounds at night hint of something sinister in the woods. He realizes that he may have opened the door to a killer when dead bodies begin to turn up.

Dong-Joo (Park Ha-Sun), who is tone-deaf, has a crush on a man and attempts to improve as a singer to become closer to him. Shing-Heung (Yoon Sang-Hyun), an instructor at a tone deaf clinic, by chance helps Dong-Joo and begins to like her. Meanwhile, Bo-Ra (Lim Jung-Eun) is a friend of Dong-Joo who also tries to helps Dong-Joo.

In a cold dark shaded anatomy classn room, 6 student prosectors are taking part in anatomy class Sun-hwa, Ki-bum, Joong-suk, Eun-joo, Ji-young and Kyung-min are smart medical college freshmen in the same anatomy class. Sun-hwa smart and confident; Ki-bum born to be a team leader full of confidence, Joong-suk son a hospital owner; Kyung-min too weak to be a doctor; Ji-young sexy and haughty but poor at study, Eun-joo studious nerd.

They are competing with each other to be the best surgeon, but are strongly tied with fellowship as a team. In the first class, they try to suppress their fear and approach the cadaver that is waiting for them…. The first meeting with a deadly beautiful cadaver, and their nightmare begins. The cadaver is assigned to them, right after the first class. They suffer from ghosts and hallucinations. After several accidents and death of some team members, they start to realize something horrible is coming for them. They do their best to survive and find one clue: these accidents all have something to do with the female cadaver.

This movie consists of 5 different stories:

1. "Seaside Flower" (Director Park Kyung Hee): Eun Hye suffering from Down’s syndrome entered school earlier than others did. Friends from school make fun of her because of her slow speech. She’s always dignified and doesn't care about what they’re saying, though. She’s pretty good at playing a flute, sending a text message by cell-phone, watching movie on the computer and telling an old story. 2. "Hey, Man~" (Director Ryoo Seung Wan): Woo Shik thinks ‘man’ should be ‘manly’ in every way. What he’s talking about, with his friends at a bar just tells us how often and seriously we discriminate against others out there; sexual discrimination, racial discrimination, treating waitresses so bad, homophobia, judging people by the way they look and education back ground, etc. In the end, all of his friends left him behind and he came over to a stranger saying “you know what I mean, ‘cause you a ‘man’!”

3. "A boy with the Knapsack" (Director Chung Ji Woo): 19-year-old Hyun Lee and Jin Sun got to take refuge from North Korea. Jin Sun is always troubled with her classmates and an owner of her part-time work place cheated her. She’s all alone at home. Her silence is made out of a lack of communication with the world, which makes people think she’s deaf. Hyun Lee misses his hometown so much and buys a lot of gifts for his parents and stuff them in his knapsack just like his routine.

4. "Someone Grateful" (Director Jang Jin): There are two guys are sitting face to face in a basement; Kyung Shin who was caught from intervention in the student movement, and a police officer, Joo Joong who’s in charge of torture. The student doesn't confess what he did and who else involved in the movement and the officer keeps on torturing him. By the way, the police officer spoke out how he’s been working as an informal worker at a police office, which he must work over time without any special bonus and any insurance from work. He’s consoled by the one who he’d arrested.

5. "Jongno, Winter" (Director Kim Dong Won): It’s very early morning on December 9th, 2003. A Chinese Korean, Kim Won Seop is found out frozen to death on the street of Seoul. One year later, a director’s searching for the deed of him somewhere around the area where he died. When it was very late and freezing night, Kim Won Seop got lost on the way to a strike site that was to stop a deportation order and to amend the Korean Residents Code. He’d been looking for some help from starving and cold all night, but nobody found him.

Five girlfriends in their early twenties live in the dingy port town of Incheon. A close-knit circle in high school, their paths begin to diverge as they step into the adult world.

At the center of the group is the beautiful and vain Hae-joo, who dreams of becoming a successful career woman. She leaves Incheon for an apartment in Seoul and a junior position with a brokerage firm.

The other girls are left behind in a state of solitude and unease; Tae-hee works for free for her parents and takes dictation from a poet suffering from cerebral palsy and Ji-young seeks a job, while caring for her grandparents in their dilapidated apartment. The twins Bi-ryu and Ohn-jo buffer themselves from change with constant togetherness.

The cellular phones ring as the girls coordinate their meetings. A lost cat, Tee tee, enters the lives of these young women, passing from one owner to the next as circumstances pull lives and friends apart and others together.

Director Jang Sun Woo might be best known for provocative, controversial films, such as Lies, A Petal, and To You From Me, but he has a quiet side as well. Winner of the Alfred-Bauer Prize at the 1994 Berlin Film Festival, HwaOmKyung (a.k.a. Passage to Buddha), one of Jang's best works, is a quiet and evocatively beautiful meditation on life. Based on former monk and political activist Go Eun's novel, HwaOmKyung is one of the best Buddhist-themed films Korea has produced. Oh Tae Kyung (Old Boy) gives a stunning performance as Seon Jae, a young boy who spends his life on the road in search of his mother. A modern unfolding of the Avatamsaka sutra, his spiritual odyssey leads him to telling encounters with strange people and, eventually, the essence of Buddhism.