71: Into the Fire

On 11 August 1950, at one of the most critical moments of the Korean War, seventy-one student soldiers defended a girls' middle school in Pohang. They were untrained, poorly armed, and facing North Korea's 766th unit. They held for eleven hours and most of them died. The defence mattered for holding the Nakdong River line. John H. Lee's film recounts that. Choi Seung-hyun, T.O.P of Big Bang, plays the students' commander in his first screen role; Cha Seung-won plays the North Korean commander and Kwon Sang-woo the most defiant boy in the group. The film's strength is that it does not conceal how little these children know about fighting. Boys cannot hold a rifle properly, cannot fire, freeze in terror, and rather than folding this into a heroic narrative the film simply leaves it there. The production was made with support from the Ministry of National Defence, which explains why the tone runs so monumental. Who it is for: viewers who like Korean war cinema and resistance stories drawn from real events. Who it is not for: anyone put off by a nationalist register, or unable to take graphic battlefield violence.