The Way Home—from Seoul and back again

By Bettie Gray Staff Editor

Over the years, movie heroes have come in all shapes and sizes. A guy with a red cape waving from his shoulders. A self-made paralegal, who has highly evolved investigative powers. Even an animated pop-up toaster. But a hero in the form of a Korean grandmother with a walking stick?

The Way Home, said to be Korea's second-highest grossing film in history, has recently been released on video and DVD, with English subtitles, a PG rating, and a running time of one hour and 25 minutes. The social wrongs in this movie don't appear in the form of gangsters, corporate polluters, or the like. What this Korean grandmother confronts is simply her seven-year-old grandson, Sang-woo.

In the first scenes, Sang-woo fights with his mother as they travel by train and bus from Seoul to the mountainous countryside, where Grandmother lives alone on the side of a hill, in an old house without running water. You soon know this is no happy family reunion.

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