Save the Green Planet

Jang's debut feature is a dark comedy which takes pain and madness seriously and asks the viewer to empathise with a psychotic loner who's kept going by uppers and seems gripped by paranoid fantasies. Not a hit on first release in Korea, but the DVD sold out overnight and the film has been collecting festival prizes around the world. Abetted by a tightrope dancer who adores him, Byung-Gu (Shin, brilliant) kidnaps the industrialist Kang in the belief that he's an alien, paving the way for an invasion from Andromeda. While Kang is tortured for information, assorted mutually antagonistic cops get on the case, soon fingering Byung-Gu as a serial killer acting on long standing grudges. Jang creates a fantasy space in which the revisionist evolutionary theories of 2001 co-exist with the history of labour activism and anti-fascist protest in Korea; the film also oscillates between wild humour, suspense, horror and pathos, sometimes all in one shot. It's quite something.