School trip
2024 · 25m · South Korea
Directed by LEE Yun-seok
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
A 16-year-old girl hides her status as a basic welfare recipient from her classmates as her last middle school field trip approaches.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A film about economic shame masquerading as a coming-of-age story—except Lee Yun-seok seems genuinely uninterested in the expected catharsis, which is exactly why it lands; the refusal to resolve or redeem becomes its own small act of resistance.
The film situates itself squarely in the Korean social-realist tradition, deploying restraint and ellipsis with precision—what Lee doesn't show us about the welfare system speaks louder than exposition, and the formal distance mirrors the girl's own self-protective distance from her peers.
The whole film pivots on Lee's choice to withhold the reveal until the final moments, letting us sit in the girl's exhausting performance of normalcy; that delayed recognition reframes everything we've already seen and becomes the emotional architecture of the entire piece.