This witty, involving Korean indie charts the uneasy, incredibly odd friendship that develops between an irascible film scholar and a naïve young Christian.
Screened as part of NZIFF 2006
Host & Guest 2005
Bangmunja
This witty, involving Korean indie charts the uneasy, incredibly odd friendship that develops between an irascible film scholar and a naïve young Christian. Ho-jun, is a cranky, socially inept film academic whose idea of flirting with the girl in the grocery store is to offer her his DVD of Fear Eats the Soul. Estranged from his son and his ex-wife, he lives a lonely, sex-obsessed existence, until he is rescued from a ridiculous accidental death by door-to-door missionary Gye-sang. A guarded friendship ensues as the pair attempt to challenge and understand each others’ utterly divergent worldviews. Ho-jun exposes Gyesang to the joys of bar girls, karaoke and Turkish art cinema, while Gye-sang attempts to reform Ho-jun’s godless and cynical existence.
“Writer-director Shin Dong-il’s film begins as a winningly off-kilter slacker comedy, and then kinda somehow amiably slouches into a downright affecting social statement. Warning to the morally upright: a picture of George W. Bush gets used in an unmentionable fashion. Repeatedly.” – Andrew Wright, The Stranger