Jang Sun-Woo, who was honoured by a retrospective at the Rotterdam festival two years ago, is now regarded as the most important film-maker in the Korean New Cinema. While he was shooting his documentary Cinema on the Road he came in contact with several street kids. After that he had his bellyful of always making ‘good films’, so he decided it was time to make a ‘bad film’. The result is stunning: a kaleidoscope of self-destruction, drug abuse, petty crime, sex, prostitution and lost lives, sometimes shot in a documentary fashion with drunkards in the street, sometimes played in scenes which the stray kids helped write, some on 35 mm, some on 16 mm andpartly shot on Digital-8. Through all this we can still see the love of Jang for his subject and his unwillingness to condemn the fringe groups.The two-art story describes the lives of the homeless teenagers and beggars who hang around Seoul’s Central Station. The characters, teenage rockers who mug people and whose rebellious attitude to the older generation makes them sell their bodies, are characterised by both humour and cynicism. The beggars rebel against the rut they are in and the affluent society. They have left home to die in the streets. The pseudo-documentary form makes it possible for the film to question the boundary between fact and fiction.
