PEPPERMINT CANDY

Time, like a train, is something that must always go forward – except in the medium of cinema. In PEPPERMINT CANDY, a piquant drama whose ingenious backtracking narrative structure commences in 1999, a well-dressed but clearly distraught man named Kim Yongho stumbles into a 20-year reunion picnic of factory workers. At first he is dimly recognized and warmly welcomed by erstwhile comrades, until his erratic actions climax in a shocking act of self-destruction. Who was this man, and what stoked the engine of his torment? We pull into the recessive stations of his life, as the layers of years peel away: A youthful sweetheart left behind. An executive and husband, both betrayed. A rookie cop, goaded into an accustomed role of bully and torturer. The gift of a camera, unused. An old war injury, both physical and emotional, that refuses to heal. And peppermint candy. Against the tumultuous backdrop of late 20th Century South Korea, Kim Yongho is, in a way, representative of his generation, a worker-businessman-soldier-policeman, whose early innocence and dreams yield to loss, disillusionment and the unbearably heartrending gulf of might-have-beens between today and yesterday. All aboard . . . (In Korean with English subtitles)