First off, here’s an idea for wholesome entertainment, suitable for the whole family – an elementary school somewhere out in the boondocks of Korea is under threat of closure with its shrinking numbers until a young teacher comes along with fresh ideas to turn things around. Start with some conflicts with over-aged students, conservative principal or staff and anxious parents.
Then mix these with some heated debates about whether encouraging creativity undermines discipline. Finally spice it up with pastoral scenes of the children harvesting their own sweet potatoes in their own school vegetable garden and you may have a recipe for a heart-warming though awfully clichéd story that may be a throwback to Sidney Poitier’s To Sir With Love.
Too treacly for your tastebuds? How about this other school-based story with a nod towards Park Chan-wook’s Sympathy For Lady Vengeance? A ex-army retiree has the local eyebrows raised when she volunteers to be a school sheriff. Comic scenes of how she bungles during her training sessions turn into sinister moments as she takes advantage of her placid demeanour and position to do away with the fourth-grade teachers one by one.
Plot No. 3 – An ex- government worker receives a windfall and pursues his dream of setting up a bar. Things go well for him until he comes to the defence of a young employee who’s being bullied by his colleagues to take part in drinking rounds of soju. The underbelly of corporate culture comes under scrutiny here through the eyes of the bartender cum pub owner – to drink or not to drink, is that simply the question?
Plot No 4 – A study of a family business in a barbershop - across three generations. The colourful lives of their patrons like the corrupt politician and head of a chaebol will form the substance of each episode. Woven into this story would be the generational clash between the family patriarch who wants to “keep what is sacred” and his grand-son who wants to move to Gangnam.
Finally, a grim story based on the memoirs of a retired prison guard whose guilty conscience drives him to seek atonement for taking part in the execution of innocent political prisoners. Set against the turbulent politics of the 1950s, we get a chance to see what Seoul was like in the post-war years.
So what do you think? !%$i$(&##%@*^%#@$%
OK , OK - I'm sticking to my day job.
sources:
http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=2929813
http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=2932715
http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=2931620
http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=2932556
http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=2932085
