Peppermint Candy

Peppermint Candy (박하사탕, 2000) is a Korean drama you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Lee Chang-dong. Spring 1999: a class reunion, a broken man who climbs onto a railway bridge, and the story that unfolds — backwards, across twenty years.

Sol Kyung-gu plays Yeong-ho, traced from an embittered middle-aged wreck all the way back to a gentle young soldier with a piece of candy in his pocket. Along the way he becomes a policeman who tortures political detainees during the Gwangju crackdown, a failed businessman, a hollow husband. Moon So-ri appears as the first love he never quite reached, whose illness shadows every chapter. The reverse chronology is not a gimmick — each step backward lands harder because you already know where it ends.

Lee Chang-dong, who later directed Oasis and Burning, built this film as a portrait of an entire generation swallowed by South Korea's authoritarian decades. Stream Peppermint Candy (2000) online on iFILM.