Director: PARK CHAN-WOOK
One dead body, two families claiming it, an invasive local news team and a small-minded government bureaucrat. Will they get to the bottom of who deserves compensation for the young girls’ death in a recent earthquake? And why is only one man left standing when an aftershock hits the morgue?
South Korea’s Park Chan-wook is internationally celebrated for his vengeance trilogy, consisting of 2002's Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy in 2003 and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance in 2005.
Judgement is Chan-wook’s only short film and we can already see the influences – Kafka, Vonnegut, Hitchcock (to name but a few) – that re-surface in his later works.
Chan-wook made Judgement after seeing footage of an earthquake which hit the famous Sampoong department store in South Korea. He interspersed the short with real news footage of the disaster and describes the film as representing a ‘collective mood of fear’.
The plot is imbued with a strong sense of stage drama and all the (unpaid) actors were theatre veterans. As Chan-wook describes:
‘For the audience it is hard to decide which character they should sympathise with. Sometimes it was the undertaker…but the undertaker could be a swindler. Sometimes the couple, sometimes the reporter, sometimes the civil servant… I guided the viewer to take an objective view.’
Commentary by Park Chan-wook recorded in Seoul, South Korea
Film courtesy of Indiestory
