A Taxi Driver(2017)
dir. Jang Hoon
A taxi fare drives into a sealed-off city.
Where to watch: Free: Kanopy; free with ads: Roku Channel, Pluto TV, Tubi, YouTube; Prime Video; rent $2.99 Amazon/Fandango At Home, $3.99 Apple TV; buy $7.99 (JustWatch US, checked 2026-11-09). Verify.Letterboxd ↗
May 1980, Seoul. A broke taxi driver, Kim Man-seob, overhears a foreign reporter offering a big fare to Gwangju and grabs it to pay his rent. The reporter is a German journalist, Peter, who has heard the city is sealed off. What they find in Gwangju is a student uprising and a military crackdown that the government is blacking out. The film is a dramatization of a real story: Jurgen Hinzpeter, the real German reporter, filmed the footage that got the story out.
Why it’s here
It's a film about the day a reporter and a taxi driver became witnesses. What's punk is the ordinary man at its center, a driver who just wanted the fare. What's pedagogical is how it shows a state sealing off a city and what it takes to get the footage out. Direct companion to Human Acts, already in the catalog. Note: R-rated; massacre scenes and shootings of civilians; older teens and adults. The taxi driver is a fictional composite and the dialogue is dramatized; Hinzpeter's real footage and role are documented. Korean and German with subtitles.
Where This Film Lives