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- In the absence of their parents, Johnny (15) and Jennifer (17) are being brought up by their "big sister" Tanya, an overdressed transvestite who eats and smokes too much and causes both kids endless embarrassment. It's a situation ripe for problems (actually, more complicated than I've made it sound), and Tanwarin's debut feature - as director, writer and star - explores those problems with unbridled determination. Both kids mess up their pursuit of romance, in the ways that teenagers do, and both look for ways to break away from the family home and become independent. For Johnny, this entails going into male prostitution, which is as much an attempt to erase his own self-esteem as a way of earning some fast bucks. Jenny makes other mistakes, but both of them wind up deeply dissatisfied. And Tanya? When Johnny catches her trying to seduce one of his buddies, things start to go downhill for her too.
- Jun (Paul Lee) is an illegal immigrant from North Korea, working in a gas station under an exploitative and abusive boss. Hyeon (Yeom Hyunjoon) is the kept boy of a married businessman, who has set him up in a swanky apartment near the government's headquarters in Yeouido. Both young men are in trouble. Jun's lack of an official identity and papers limits him to dead-end jobs (the gas station, handing out flyers, and eventually male prostitution) and leaves him always in fear of arrest and deportation. Hyeon, who is supposed to be available whenever his sugar daddy "needs" him, stifles in his up-market "prison". These two finally find each other through an Internet site, with disastrous results. The sudden convergence of their opposite lives gives Kim the cues he needs for a series of reflections on the implications of "statelessness".
- Each of us is captured on surveillance cameras, on average, 300 times a day. These all-seeing 'eyes' observe a young woman named Qing Ting (her name means 'Dragonfly') as she leaves the Buddhist temple where she has been training to be a nun and returns to the secular world, taking a job in a highly mechanized dairy farm. Ke Fan, a technician working on the farm, falls in love with her and breaks the law in an attempt to please her. On his release from jail Ke Fan looks for Qing Ting again, without success - until he comes to think that she has reinvented herself as the online celebrity Xiao Xiao. But Xiao Xiao slips from her pedestal, and Ke Fan resolves to reinvent himself as Qing Ting.
- One day, while wondering what kind of film he should be making, Go Riju befriends the driver of a newspaper-delivery truck. The man is rather recalcitrant, a bit of a loner, but Riju pressures him into agreeing to become the subject of a documentary. Sadly, nothing very illuminating comes of their encounters, and the man resists Riju's attempts to get him to read books and discuss them. Eventually he tells Riju to get lost, and Riju turns in despair to the man's next-door neighbour, a student who is apparently having trouble with his studies - You can't tell whether it's by accident or design while you're watching it (things become clearer once it's over), but Blind Alley adds up to a remarkably clear account of student-worker relationships in the 1980s. By making his own uncertainties the starting point for his film, and by measuring them against a stranger to whom they mean little or nothing, Riju in effect dramatises the impotence of many post-political intellectuals as the old Marxist dreams of revolution died their natural death. This is what it's like to grope for something to believe in at 24 frames-per-second.