Artwork by Jin Lee
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.