Lin’s family is financially devastated when his father undergoes a pricey medical treatment for leukemia. Despite her overbearing workload, his mother makes rounds asking for loans, Lin’s older sister becomes a call girl and Lin plays hooky from school on the riverbank. Fantasia is an ironically titled stark drama about a disintegrating family, relentlessly revealing the contemporary Chinese meaning of value. The money-borrowing mother is callously advised against spending on an incurable patient. With money as the practical standard of value to the Chinese of today all things inconvertible to money are useless. The constant flash of Beijing Olympic news on background TV screen suggests such values are not just individual but also national. Ironically, the sole fantasy appears briefly in the film’s final scene, in which Lin sees a sound and healthy father as he clinches the blood transfusion tube connected to his father, now a mere partial object that has run out of its value and utility. But in fact, isn’t it a money-focused society that has actually fallen into a collective fantasy? (CHO Hyeyoung)