Nappeun Chingu

Jin-Ju is bad. She smokes, drinks, runs away from home, and has no qualms making her parents worry. Her mother and sister beg her to be a better student, sister, daughter; her beleaguered father expresses his concerns with his fists. Bad Friends is set in the 1990s in a South Korea torn between tradition and Western modernity and haunted by an air of generalized gloom. Cycles of abuse abound as the characters enact violence within their power structures: parents beat children, teachers beat students, older students beat younger students. But at each moment the duress verges on bleakness, Ancco pulls back with soft moments of friendship between Jin-Ju and her best friend, Jeong-Ae. What unfolds is a story of female friend...