Hacker Cinema
A Taxi Driver
택시운전사
2017 · Film · 138 min
Directed by Jang Hoon
May, 1980. Man-seob is a taxi driver in Seoul who lives from hand to mouth, raising his young daughter alone. One day, he hears that there is a foreigner who will pay big money for a drive down to Gwangju city. Not knowing that he’s a German journalist with a hidden agenda, Man-seob takes the job.
3 positivefrom 3 commenters
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3 comments on Hacker News
Here’s a more recent movie related to this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taxi_Driver
It’s pretty good, you should be able to find it on streaming services.
I think it was a decent movie, except for that one... Hollywood action scene toward the end, which felt out of place and more like a "fan service."
Not depicting the same event, but if you liked A Taxi Driver, I'd also recommend 1987 - When the Day Comes which depicts people fighting against the same dictator. (Fun fact: in 1987, the role of one major character was kept secret and he's never called by his name until the end of the movie, because otherwise everybody would've recognized who he was.)
Related movie recommendation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taxi_Driver
It recreates some of the original newsreel footage from Gwangju that was smuggled out into the West, embedded into a Hollywood-style narrative based on historical characters. With Song Kang-ho, recently familiar from "Parasite".
There's a lot of Korean cinema that processes Gwangju in one form or another, but this is one of the more accessible entries, especially to an international audience.