The Net

The boat of the North Korean fisherman Nam Chul-woo breaks down and drifts into southern waters. He is captured in the South, interrogated and pressured to defect. When he refuses and goes home, he meets the other face of the same suspicion: his licence is revoked, and in the end he is shot by soldiers for refusing to leave the water. Kim Ki-duk wrote and directed. Ryoo Seung-bum stars. It runs 114 minutes. It played the Toronto International Film Festival and opened in Korea on 6 October 2016. The box office stopped at 379,506 dollars. Lee Won-keun was nominated for Best New Actor at the 37th Blue Dragon Film Awards. Its politics are symmetrical: both regimes want to use the man as evidence, and neither will accept that he might want anything other than to go home. Who it is for: viewers who like the two-Koreas subject handled at human scale. Who it is not for: anyone who would rather not watch a film by a director facing the 2017 sexual assault allegations. That information is on the table when weighing it.