A Hot Roof

The subtitles are kind of dodgy and there's the odd lapse in the script, but Lee Min-Yong's debut feature is basically a gas. Already the most widely-sold Korean film ever made (but it doesn't have distribution in Britain), it's a daydream about a major skirmish in the sex-war: women, who come to the rescue of a battered wife and accidentally kill her husband, barricade themselves on the roof of their apartment block, resist arrest, and win national support. The women's struggle for solidarity (most tested when they find out that one of them is actually a drag queen) is wittily contrasted with the quasi-gay bonding of two burglars trapped in an apartment below by the police siege. Funny, raunchy and unashamedly pulpy, this knockout entertainment could only have come from a society and culture in the throes of rapid change.