During the Korean War in the early 1950s, a mother’s family comes and stays at Dong-man’s house. His uncle on his father’s side is a North Korean partisan and his uncle on his mother’s side dies while fighting as a South Korean soldier. This is why his grandmothers don’t get along well. When all of the North Korean partisans who attacked downtown were killed, Dong-man’s father thinks that Dong-man’s uncle is dead. However, his grandmother does not believe it and visits a fortune-teller, who says he is still alive and will come back home soon. Based on Yun Heung-gil’s medium-length story, this film is Yu’s most well-known work produced late in his career. The film deals with shamanism and the barbarous time of Korean history?struggles and suppression of armed guerrillas, massacres of civilians due to mutual revenges, and the division of the Korean peninsula along with extreme ideological conflicts?and pursues true reconciliation between people.
 
Yu Hyun-mok was born in Sariwon (present day North Korea). His film Aimless Bullet (1961) has repeatedly been voted the best Korean film of all time in local critics’ polls. Korean critics have said his directing style is “in the tradition of the Italian Neorealists,” yet the terms ‘modernist’ or ‘expressionistic’ are just as applicable to his works. Yu died in 2009.