A Petal

The first mature attempt in Korean culture to come to terms with the Kwangju Massacre of 1980, an unhealed wound comparable with the Tiananmen Square massacre in the minds of Chinese. A young woman, nameless and mentally disturbed, wanders the countryside looking for her brother; she runs into a heavy-drinking labourer and starts tagging along behind him. He tries to get rid of her by insulting, abusing and finally raping her, but she stays with him. Through flashbacks (two of them animated) we learn what the man doesn't know: how the girl's brother and mother died, why she cracked mentally. The girl is perhaps too fragile a symbol to personify the entire nation's trauma, but Jang's shattering film none the less sets a new benchmark for the serious treatment of politics and sex in Korean cinema.