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More than 8m Koreans bought tickets to see it, but Kwak's autobiographical film is not your average Korean blockbuster. It traces the relationships between four young men across 20 years, from schooldays in the '70s to an adulthood in the mid-'90s which sees one dead, another in jail for ordering his murder, another happily married and the fourth just back from the US and poised to begin a career in the film industry. Shooting impressionistically and draining most of the colour from the images to stress how remote in time these relatively recent memories seem, Kwak focuses squarely on questions of trust, honour and loyalty. There are some large-canvas action sequences (a gang fight which takes over an entire cinema) and some moments of intense violence, but the core of the film is an account of the joys and terrors of male bonding, rendered with a raw immediacy.