A Day Off

On a Sunday a penniless unmarried young couple meet as they do every week. The woman is pregnant and believes they are not ready to bring a child into the world; the man sets out to go round his friends to find the money that is needed. The film follows him all day and records an overcast winter day, the empty streets and a possibility that grows a little smaller each time. The account reaches no verdict and judges nobody; it looks at how poverty turns a person into the spectator of their own life. Silence and walking take up more room than speech. Shin Seong-il plays the lead in Lee Man-hee’s seventy four minute South Korean film, completed in 1968.