If You Were Me

Human rights is a newish concept in South Korea (dictatorial military governments until 1993), so it was a smart idea at the National Human Rights Commission to invite six of the country's leading directors to make episodes for a portmanteau feature on assorted rights issues. The result doesn't completely avoid preachiness, but it's a lot less didactic (and a lot more cinematic) than you might expect. Park Kwang-Su's episode, made before the project picked up its focus, touches on sexism, but it's basically a neat little car-park ghost story. Jeong imagines the plight of a convicted paedophile released into the community, and Yeo invites a disabled actor to recreate his most famous public protest. Park Chan-Wook excavates the scandal of a Nepalese woman immigrant who spent six years in a Korean mental hospital for no good reason. The other two episodes are small classics. Park Jin-Pyo looks at the horrible phenomenon of middle-class parents who force their kids to undergo surgery to their tongues, supposedly to improve their ability to speak English. And Yim comically deconstructs the pressures on Korean women to be slim and round-eyed, which start in school and seemingly never stop.