JUVENILE OFFENDER World Cinema

Kang’s second feature JUVENILE OFFENDER is South Korea’s official entry for this year’s Academy Awards®. An appeal for societal and personal reform, this intimate crime drama peers into the consequences of cyclical, intergenerational abandonment as experienced by a troubled 16 year old boy named Jang.  After falling in with the wrong crowd and committing larceny, Ji ends up in juvenile detention, where he reunites with his destitute mother who gave birth to him as a teenager and left him when he was only three years old. Against the backdrop of Seoul’s affluent metropolis, Ji’s story is as much about social problems as it is about a young outsider’s challenge to rise above his circumstances. Employing natural lighting techniques and the handheld camera, Kang both tenderly humanizes his protagonist’s lamentable journey and breathes life into a subject worthy of the world’s attention.