Three Friends

This terrific first feature by one of Korea's very few women directors is focused entirely on young men: three kids from screwed-up families, failures at school and with no real social prospects, looking ahead with dismay at two years of compulsory military service. Yim's story (parts of which are a deliberate challenge to Korean censorship) faithfully reflects social realities at the bottom of the economic scale, but her approach to character and situation is far from grungy social realism. She never forgets that real people laugh, even when there's not much to laugh about, and she roots her underlying anger in her wry awareness that people tend to blame society when they've fucked up their own lives.