Gilsoddeum

In the summer of 1983, South Korea's national obsession was a TV programme designed to reunite families separated in the Korean War thirty-three years earlier. Im Kwon-taek's movie takes the broadcasts as a documentary starting point, then spins off into a Fassbinderesque fiction about a dispersed family that comes back together, only to find that the pieces no longer fit. The issues are adult, and so is the treatment:no melodrama, no tub-thumping, but a piercing analysis of social and psychological blocks.