WAY BACK HOME

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WAY BACK HOME

Apr 03, 2019

Writer by Pierce Conran
View1243

2013 | 130 MIN | Drama

DIRECTOR PANG Eun-jin

CAST JEON Do-yeon, KO Soo, RYU Tae-ho, BAE Sung-woo

RELEASE DATE December 11, 2013

CONTACT CJ Entertainment

Tel +82-2-371-5500

Fax +82-2-371-6340

Email filmsales@cj.net

One of Korea’s most respected performers, JEON Do-yeon returned to screens following a two-year hiatus in the winter of 2013 in Way Back Home, a prison drama based on the true story of an ordinary housewife ripped from her family and forced to spend two years incarcerated on Martinique, a faraway French island nestled within the Caribbean Sea. The film was a quick return to theaters for actress-director PANG Eun-jin, following just 14 months after Perfect Number (2012), her adaptation of Japanese author HIGASHINO Keigo's thriller.

Jeong-yeon (JEON Do-yeon) and Jong-bae (KO Soo) are a married couple struggling to stay afloat with their young daughter. Life goes on until one of Jong-bae’s friends kills himself, and his debt, on which Jong-bae signed as a guarantor, plunges them into financial ruin. Against her instincts, Jeong-yeon takes on a risky errand for one of Jong-bae’s shady friends, in the hopes of helping ease their woes. Before she knows it, she finds herself at Orly Airport in Paris, pulled aside by customs officers who connect her to a bag filled with cocaine. She is sent to jail, but with no one around she can communicate with and an embassy that seems ill-inclined to help, she is soon sent to faraway Martinique Island where she is held indefinitely while her husband desperately tries to find a way to get her home.

Based on the real story of JANG Mi-jeong, who was jailed in 2004 for smuggling drugs that she claimed she wasn’t aware she was transporting, which was later brought to the public’s attention through an investigative-documentary show aired on KBS, Way Back Home takes a diplomatic incident and combines it with melodramatic tropes, anchoring the themes with the tale of a family unfairly torn apart and kept on separate sides of the planet.

Star of works such as LEE Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine, which earned her the Best Actress Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007, JEON puts in another commanding and empathetic performance as a woman ripped from her circumstances and placed into unfamiliar surroundings, growing from a terrified and lonely prisoner into a hardened character throughout the film’s running time.

While PANG focuses on several villains in her version of JANG’s ordeal, she largely focuses on the injustice of her situation, as institutional failures allow this woman to fall between the cracks and be left to rot in a distant land, only to be saved after her story is related to a larger, disbelieving public. Way Back Home proved to be a solid performer at the box office, attracting close to 1.9 million viewers and earning more Best Actress accolades for JEON, from the Maxmovie Best Film Award and the Korea Gold Awards Festival.

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