Alice in Earnestland

Soo-nam is a hard-working woman. She collects certificate after certificate, takes any job, does everything she can. Her husband is lying in hospital after an accident and the bills keep coming. One day the road ahead of her closes off, and Soo-nam finds a method of her own. That method leads somewhere nobody expects. Ahn Gooc-jin's first film tells the working-class order of debt and labour in South Korea as black comedy. Lee Jung-hyun takes the lead. The tone is deliberately unstable: it can be funny and hard in the same scene. The film won the grand prize at the Jeonju Film Festival in 2015 and drew notice among low-budget Korean productions.