Stateless Things

One of the brightest talents in Korean indie filmmaking (his shocking debut feature Faceless Things was one of the great films maudits of our ime), Kim Kyung-Mook is going from strength to strength. Stateless Things crosscuts between the stories of two dissimilar young men in present-day Seoul.

Jun is an illegal immigrant from North Korea (he came via China) whose lack of an official ID limits him to the very lowest rung of the employment ladder. He works under an abusive boss in a filling station and hands out flyers in his free hours.

He forms a tentative friendship with a girl, also from the North, but both of them are in constant fear of being found and deported. He eventually drifts into male prostitution. Hyeon, by contrast, is the kept boy of a married businessman, who has installed him in an upscale apartment near the government buildings in Yeouido. More and more he chafes under the constraints of his situation, and the rows with his sugar-daddy grow increasingly vehement. These two young men—boys, really—will eventually meet through an internet site in a traumatic attempt to regularise their 'stateless' conditions.