Running Against No One But Himself ¹

Three years before a supporting role finally got people asking who he was, Park Seong-il played a national-record holder past his best, running a race he already knows he cannot win outright.

Sprinter follows three 100-metre runners preparing, each for a different reason, for a national-team selection trial: Hyeon-su, once the country's fastest man over the distance, now unattached and well past his best; Jeong-ho, currently the country's fastest, afraid of losing the position; and Jun-seo, a high-school prospect whose team is at risk of being disbanded if his times don't improve.² Park Seong-il plays Hyeon-su — a former record holder racing, in practice, no one but the clock and his own history.

The film is the second feature from director Choi Seung-yeon, who also wrote, shot and edited it, produced by Manhwagyeong Films and distributed by Studio Aid.² It carries a 12+ rating and runs 87 minutes.

Park Seong-il, Im Ji-ho and Song Deok-ho — the actors playing the film's three runners — are reported to have trained under actual national-team coaching staff to physically pass as sprinters, for anywhere from one month to more than six weeks depending on the actor. In one interview, director Choi Seung-yeon described the film's origin as a story about someone who keeps going rather than giving up, and said she wanted it to read as an everyday, ungrandiose story a viewer could recognise as their own present, past or possible future.³

Sprinter premiered as the opening film of the 47th Seoul Independent Film Festival in November 2021, then had its general theatrical release on 24 May 2023 — a gap of roughly a year and a half between festival premiere and public release.⁴ It drew a reported 7,680 admissions during its run — a small commercial footprint typical of the films this magazine covers — with a wide gap between critics' and audience scores.⁴

What makes Sprinter worth a piece in this magazine is not, on the strength of what we can establish from a distance, a judgement on the film itself — we have not seen it. It is where the credit sits in Park Seong-il's own record: one of three billed leads in a real festival opening film, playing a character built almost entirely around the specific indignity of having already peaked. That is a heavier credit than most of what came before or after it in his filmography, and it still took another three years, and a supporting role in a television drama, for anyone outside a festival audience to start asking who he was.

For the rest of that record, and for the restaurant he was already running by the time this film reached theatres, read the profile of Park Seong-il and our piece on Dreamland, the restaurant that once happened to share this magazine's working title.

1. ¹ SAMPLE COPY: preview build, not a published piece. Sprinter is a real 2023 feature film. This piece is written from aggregated public festival, database and interview coverage, not from a screening: no Second Look Korea editor has seen the film. Nothing here is a verified review until fact and legal review is complete.
2. ² Plot, cast, crew, rating and runtime compiled from Cine21's film-info page, the Korean Wikipedia article on the film, and KinoLights; not cross-checked against a primary production or distributor source.
3. ³ Director's remarks translated and paraphrased from a Korean-language interview (Sports Kyunghyang / Daum, 12 May 2023) reached via an aggregated summary rather than the original article text; treated here as paraphrase, not verbatim quotation, until the original wording can be checked directly.
4. ⁴ Festival premiere (47th Seoul Independent Film Festival, opening film, November 2021), theatrical release date and admissions figures per Xportsnews, IndieSpace and Cine21; the year discrepancy in Cine21's own person-database credit (listed as 2022) is unresolved — see the note in beat 2.

TITLE

Sprinter · 스프린터

DIRECTOR

Choi Seung-yeon

FORMAT

2023 · 87 min · feature

REVIEWED IN

Issue Zero