Fantasporto

 

Produção: Choi Jeong-hwa, Jin-sook Lee / Duração: 140’ /

 

Lee is a Korean police captain whose cruel Japanese overlords have charged him with rooting out members of his country’s resistance movement. But Captain Lee has a history of selling out his own people to secure a favourable position with the Japanese, he’s been hit harder than usual by the death of Kim Jan-ok (Park Hee-soon), a resistance fighter who used to be his classmate. The leader of the resistance, Che-san (Lee Byung-hun), senses that this turncoat, if approached and handled properly, might be turned once more — this time in their favour. And so begins an incremental, ingeniously coded psychological dance between Lee and a key resistance figure, whose antique shop is a front for a scheme to smuggle explosives from Shanghai into Seoul. While Lee could theoretically bring down this operation at any moment, he seems just as likely to become an ally, thanks in no small part to Kim’s skillful application of pressure…

With the action thriller “The Age of Shadows, Jee-won Kim won the Best Picture award in the Action Features category at the 2016 Fantastic Fest held in Austin Texas, it won the Korean Film Critics Award and was chosen to be the Korean candidate to the Oscars.