박하사탕 (Peppermint Candy)

The film runs backwards through twenty years of South Korean history, from 1999 to 1979, and each step back is a public event that made the man in it. From the record: the Gwangju Uprising of May 1980, in which conscripts were sent against civilians and hundreds were killed; the interrogation rooms of the authoritarian years; and the 1997 financial crisis that ruined the small businessmen of the 1990s. Lee Chang-dong's structure is the argument: by the time the film reaches the sweet, ordinary young man of 1979, the audience has already watched what the country turned him into, and cannot unsee it.