Bogotá: City of the Lost

The 1997 crisis took everything the family had. Kook-hee is nineteen and comes to Colombia with his parents. There is an order the Korean immigrants have built in Bogotá; cloth is brought in, got through customs and sold at the market. Part of the work is not legal. Kook-hee starts at the bottom of that order. Warehouse work, hauling, then bargaining. He climbs. The man who took him in is Soo-yeong, and there is an elder with connections at customs. As Kook-hee rises he cuts across both of them. Kim Seong-je directs. Song Joong-ki plays Kook-hee; Lee Hee-jun and Kwon Hae-hyo are in the cast. It is a South Korean production. The shoot did begin in Bogotá; the production stopped because of the pandemic and the team reorganised and resumed in Korea in June 2021. The film sat waiting for years because of that delay; it screened at the Busan Film Festival on 3 October 2024 and reached cinemas on 31 December 2024. It did not work at the box office; the break even point was three million admissions and the film fell far below it. It went out on Netflix on 3 February 2025. The matter it treats is migration and hierarchy; an order built in a foreign country produces its own rules. The narrative follows the shape of the rise story and does not step outside it. Its limit is structure; the narrative is long, the character development jumps, and the leaps in time weaken it. Who it is for: viewers who like Korean crime films and rise narratives. Who it is not for: it is conventional, long, and the ending unsatisfying.