The President's Barber

Seoul, Hyoja-dong. Han Mo-yeon runs a barber shop in the neighbourhood, which happens to sit next to Cheong Wa Dae, the presidential residence. One day he is called inside: he is to cut Park Chung-hee's hair. The man knows nothing about politics and does not understand what is going on; he simply does his job, and precisely because of that he lands in the middle of everything. His son, having diarrhoea, is treated as a communist and comes home having been tortured. The film tells it from the boy's point of view. Lim Chan-sang directs the Korean film; a hundred and sixteen minutes, with Song Kang-ho as the barber and Moon So-ri as his wife. It covers roughly twenty years, from Park's rise to his assassination in 1979, and keeps the comedy and the fear inside the same scene.