Fighter

Young Jin-ah, a North Korean refugee, has completed her social adjustment training in South Korea, but she still feels lost in her small studio in Seoul. Her main objective is to earn enough money to get her father from China to South Korea. So she picks up any job she can find. She lands a cleaning gig at a boxing gym and soon becomes fascinated by the boxing sport. Her enthusiasm does not go unnoticed: Tae-soo, the gym director's assistant, recognizes her potential and urges her to take up the sport herself. She remains hesitant, but when her money troubles increase after an incident, she decides to rise to the challenge.

Fighter is not a film about a sports talent eventually reaching the top, as the cliché would have it, but rather a character study of a woman, excellently played by Lim Seong-mi, for whom keeping her head up is a daily struggle in itself.

This film can also be seen at De Balie on August 22. Click here for tickets.

Het Filmgesprek organizes a discussion after this film on Monday 23 August in Rialto De Pijp. Rinke Vreeke will host the conversation, in which participants reflect on the film in an in-depth discussion. Rinke is program maker and urban geographer, en recently conducted a research on loneliness within cities. Part of her research was an open air exhibition on the border of Leidsche Rijn and Utrecht.

When does a film invite you to engage in conversation with others who have just seen the same film? That happens especially when the movie really does something to you. The images, characters or story may have moved, amazed or annoyed you. In any case: when a film touches you, you can't stop talking about it.