A Taxi Driver

May 1980. A Seoul taxi driver raising his daughter alone picks up a fare that pays well: a German who wants to go to Gwangju. The passenger is Jurgen Hinzpeter, a journalist heading there to film what is happening. Once inside the city they see what the army is doing to the demonstrators, and the driver's job turns into getting the footage out. Jang Hoon directed. The story rests on the Gwangju uprising of 18 to 27 May 1980, in which an estimated 2,500 people died. The subject was unspeakable in South Korea for decades, because those who backed the regime stayed in power. Nobody knew who the real driver was. After the film's enormous success his son revealed the identity in September 2017: the man was Kim Sa-bok, and he had died of cancer in December 1984, only four years after the uprising. The film took 87.1 million dollars worldwide and was the second-biggest South Korean release of 2017. It was submitted as the country's Oscar entry and won Best Film at the Blue Dragon Awards. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 97 percent. Who it is for: viewers who like political drama built on real events, and anyone who likes watching Song Kang-ho. Who it is not for: anyone after exact history. The driver's name in the film differs from the real man's, and several passages including the escape sequence were invented for effect.