Byeong-tae can’t do anything right. Physically weak, disastrous as a student, scorned several times over by the girl he fancies, he almost ends up in jail. To his rescue comes the ‘professional beggar’ Min-wu. The older man, a walking monument to scruffy resourcefulness, drags him off to a brothel where the innocent Chun-ja holds out against her fate. The two men smuggle her away from a brutal boss, and off they travel, by hook and often by crook, through the wintery landscape. They vow to return Chun-ja to her mother down south, but the boss and his henchmen are in pursuit.

The best loved of all South Korean road movies. Two-guys, usually misfits, and a girl, often a prostitute, wander a snowy landscape: the formula was invented in the mid 1970s in Lee Man-hee’s The Road to Sampo. Bae would use it again but never more movingly.