TAKE CARE OF MY CAT

A sleeper hit at the time of its release, Jeong Jae-eun’s perceptive debut TAKE CARE OF MY CAT chronicles the lives of five graduating friends whose bonds begin to fracture as they contend with their share of squashed dreams and unequal opportunities. Director Jeong sets the lives of her protagonists (among them Bae Doona and Lee Yo-won in breakout roles) against the industrial backdrop of Incheon, a port city adjacent to Seoul and bearing the brunt of South Korea’s ruthless globalization efforts. In the doing, her film expands to accommodate notions of class, solidarity and privilege – in what is now a timeless snapshot of a rapidly evolving society. Alternately bleak and sunny, realistic and effortlessly cool, suffused with the joys of girlhood yet clear-eyed about the uneasy transition into adulthood, TAKE CARE OF MY CAT offers a tender and a multi-faceted portrait of young women at the turn of the new millennium.

"What I love about this movie is that it shows friendship as something that perseveres in spite of real life problems. Tae-hie and Ji-Young keep their friendship alive and the final grace note of the movie shows them supporting one another. While relationships often crumble due to unknowable circumstances I think there is something extremely powerful in films like TAKE CARE OF MY CAT where sisterhood is shown as eternal. I'm always going to live for those moments in cinema where Frances and Sophie share a knowing glance in a moment of success, a slow dance to a Cyndi Lauper song at a High School reunion, or Ji-Young and Tae-Hie deciding to run away together. Sisterhood for life." - Willow Maclay