A Taxi Driver
A taxi driver and a German reporter that help report Gwangju uprising in 1980.
Metadata
| Director | Jang Hoon |
| Year | 2017 |
| Writer | Eom Yu-na |
| Stars | Song Kang-ho, Thomas Kretschmann, Yoo Hae-jin, Ryu Jun-yeol |
The movie in 3 sentences
A Taxi Driver follows a Seoul taxi driver who unknowingly drives a German journalist into Gwangju during the 1980 uprising. At first, he is mostly concerned with getting paid and making it back home, but the violence he witnesses gradually forces him to understand the scale of what is happening around him.
I had heard about Gwangju incident growing up because my parents were part of that generation, but I never really understood how brutal the events were or how much had been hidden, distorted, and suppressed afterward. Watching the film made that history feel much more immediate than simply reading about it ever had.
What I really admired was the almost eyewitness quality of the filmmaking. The director and actors make you feel less like you are watching history from a distance and more like you are sitting in the back seat of that taxi, slowly realizing along with the driver that something terrible is unfolding. That sense of being physically present makes the violence and confusion much harder to dismiss as just another historical event.
Because I went in knowing far less than I should have, the movie ended up feeling especially significant. It didn’t just tell me what happened; it made me feel the shock of discovering it.