After many years in an insane asylum a man returns to find that the village of his birth is gone and a massive, mysteriously empty factory has sprung up in its place.
Two legendary Go players, once student and master, face victory and defeat as they inevitably come face to face as rivals.
Byung-gu, a once-famous former professional boxer, makes ends meet doing odd jobs at the gym. While eager to start boxing again, he gets diagnosed with "punch drunk syndrome," a condition caused by cerebral concussions. One day, a new member of the gym arrives and volunteers to help Byung-gu.
The life of Go master Wu Qingyuan from his meteoric rise as a child prodigy to fame and fortune as a revolutionary strategic thinker, as well as the tumultuous conflicts between his homeland of China and his adopted nation of Japan.
May, 1980. Man-seob is a taxi driver in Seoul who lives from hand to mouth, raising his young daughter alone. One day, he hears that there is a foreigner who will pay big money for a drive down to Gwangju city. Not knowing that he’s a German journalist with a hidden agenda, Man-seob takes the job.
In 1987 Korea, under an oppressive military regime, a college student gets killed during a police interrogation involving torture. Government of officials are quick to cover up the death and order the body to be cremated. A prosecutor who is supposed to sign the cremation release, raises questions about a 21-year-old kid dying of a heart attack, and he begins looking into the case for truth. Despite a systematic attempt to silence everyone involved in the case, the truth gets out, causing an eruption of public outrage.
An idle part-time college lecturer is annoyed by the yapping sound of a nearby dog. He decides to take drastic action.
A young Chinese Go board game player arrives in Japan for training. He doesn't speak Japanese and becomes embarrassed living there. By dropping his Go stones, he happens to meet an old Japanese woman who sells vegetables on the street. They become familiar with each other. The young Chinese Go player, the old woman named Igarashi and her grandson Shoichi then live together.
One Sunday, a penniless unmarried young South Korean couple meet, as they do every Sunday; while the pregnant young woman believes they are not ready to bring a child into the world, the young man decides to go visit his friends to borrow money for delivery.
Sang-hoon is a lowlife gangster, a debt collector exercising thuggish ways to collect his money. The recipient of nothing but anger since his childhood, he expresses himself through violence. When he finally encounters someone who can stand up to him, feisty school-girl Yoon-hee they become unlikely friends.
During the late 1980s, two detectives in a South Korean province attempt to solve the nation's first series of rape-and-murder cases.
When two brothers are forced to fight in the Korean War, the elder decides to take the riskiest missions if it will help shield the younger from battle.
In the spring of 1999, a group of old friends gather to celebrate their 20 year reunion. Among the group is Yeong-ho, a cold, unhappy man, whose demeanor puts a damper on the festivities. The seriousness of Yeong-ho's depression becomes apparent when he climbs a railroad bridge and looks like he might jump. At this crucial moment, memories of seven crucial episodes from Yeong-ho's past flood his mind.
You earn as much as you work, and you live off that money. This simple proposition has always been a problem for Jung-cheol. At the soybean paste factory he went to work for in the bitter winter, he dreams of travelling to warm Philippines in spring - as long as he survives the winter making his portion of the soybean paste that he promised the boss. But the more he struggles to live, the worse it gets. And soon, the fermentation room turns musty with the black mold spreading from the thousands of ferment boiled soybean lumps.
Three friends, Duk-bae, Chun-sik, and Kil-nam, work each at a suburban Chinese restaurant, a barbershop, and a motel. The three friends are clueless about their future. They just share the drinks and love stories. Kil-nam is in love with Jin-ok working at a hair salon and Chun-sik is after Yu who also works at the barbershop. Naive Duk-bae's mind is torn between Chun-sun who works at a factory and an uptown girl Myung-hi.
Beginning with the suicide of a film director, this work represents the Korean New Wave Cinema movement that focused on criticizing the Korean society in the 1980s through satire and humor. The journey taken by the characters, who lead low lives at the margins of the society, award them with a sense of liberation, however brief.
On October 26, 1979, President Park Chung-hee, who had ruled South Korea since 1961, was assassinated by his director of intelligence. The film depicts the events of that night.
A Korean writer travels to Vietnam to do research for her story about a cursed portrait of a Vietnamese girl named Muoi.
Ten years before the outbreak of the Second World War in Asia, a Japanese Go master and his Chinese rival meet in China to play a game of Go (loosely described as an Asian version of chess). It soon becomes evident that the Chinese master's son is the most talented player that the Japanese master has ever encountered, and he convinces the boy's father to let him bring the child back to Japan to train him as a professional Go player. Years pass, and as the young Chinese master grows to maturity in Japan, the Japanese invasion of China forces him to choose between his triumphant career and his loyalty to his native country. His decision is complicated by his marriage to the daughter of the Japanese master, with whom he has produced a child. His choice will profoundly alter the lives of two families. Their saga serves as a reflection of the tragic relations between their two great countries, and the possibility of reconciliation and healing.
Duk-soo lost his father and younger sister while taking refuge during the Korean War. He leaves for Germany to work as a miner and enters the Vietnam War. He wishes to find his sister.