The Contact

Dong-hyun, a radio presenter, receives a package with no sender; inside is a record. Hoping it came from his former lover, he plays Pale Blue Eyes from it on air. Listening in her car at that moment is Soo-hyun, who takes telephone orders for a living and carries a love that has no place of its own. The song connects the two of them. Without ever meeting, they start writing to each other through the earliest online chat screens. Chang Youn-hyun's film records Seoul at the end of the nineties and a way of meeting that was new at the time. The telling is slow, quiet and held at a distance; two people come to know each other without seeing each other. It was among the most widely seen Korean films of 1997 and is counted as one of the starting points of the country's new cinema.