Black Republic

Park Kwang-Su is the foremost director of the New Korean Cinema, and this is the best of his three features to date. Soon after the brutal suppression of the Kwangju Uprising in 1980, a student activist on the wanted list hides out in a dying mining town near the North Korean border. Very little happens in plot terms, but his edgy relationships with others (a prostitute who's also on the run from something in her past, a mother-fixated thug who turns out to be the spoiled son of the town's last employer) give the film all the grip of a hard-boiled thriller. It adds up to a persuasive account of the terrible state of South Korean society a decade ago (and by implication, still).