While a film festival is set up as an arena where ‘pleasure’is embraced, it is also a place where we as a general audience or cinephiles celebrate the meaning of cinema and also contemplate how we should live with it as well. For the 7th Pusan International Film Festival (PIFF), it will be Kim Ki-duk’s The Coast Guard that opens this festive event. With controversial and sometimes commercially successful films such as The Isle, Address Unknown and Bad Guy in his track record, with this latest feature Kim Ki-duk once again reminds us of the sensitive issues which haunt our everyday lives. An observation point coast guard whose greatest goal in life was to arrest North Korean spies attempting to infiltrate the coastal area, faces his worst nightmare when he mistakenly shoots a young villager in the midst of having sex with a village girl. The girl goes mad and becomes the observation point sex toy, while the guilt-ridden coast guard too goes through mental problems. Eventually, he is discharged from the military, but refuses to abandon his unit, not to mention his military attire, until tragedy hits everyone involved in the incident. In The Coast Guard, any trace of desire for human ties is difficult to find. Furthermore, the fact that director Kim refrains from using poetic images makes this film perhaps the most dark and hard-boiled piece among his works. From the beginning, the protagonist, deprived of humanity, is haunted by an abnormal obsession. And as the film progresses, he destroys himself and those who surround him. This film is an explicit and autobiographical examination of the director’s own dark memories and obsessions. At the same time, it is also a shocking report on the oppressiveness that permeates Korean society. (Huh Moon-yung)