It made me think of Yunbogi's Diary, despite being a conventional film with a flag-waving happy ending. (The Japanese flag, obviously. Korea was under Japanese military rule and this was during World War Two, so this Korean film had a Japanese scriptwriter.) The film's in Korean, but with occasional snippets of Japanese. The most bizarre is at the end. Our Korean heroes raise and bow to a Japanese flag (the old wartime one you can't use today).

"Vow to the flag! Pledge as imperial citizens! One: we are citizens of the great Japanese empire. Two: we are loyal with all our heart to the emperor. Three: as citizens of the empire, we train to become excellent and strong citizens."

That was mildly disturbing, but also relatively inoffensive by the standards of wartime propaganda. The sentiments being expressed are theoretically admirable. "I hope you will be of big service to our country. If you become that, then there will be no more poor children like you in our country."

Anyway, like Yunbogi's Diary, this about street children who peddle on the streets to survive... but what we see of their lives is more optimistic than in that film. There are still plenty of reasons to be worried, mind you. Criminal gangs buy children from beggars, exploit them mercilessly and will even chase after them if their little income streams run away. Ordinary people mostly don't give a damn. However, there's also:

(a) Bang Seong-bin (Kim Il-hae) who's setting up an orphanage and is based on a real person. He sacrifices so much that his own two children might have to quit school. His wife's unimpressed. ("She seems to have a strict limit on affection and compassion. Of course she would never dare to criticise you, but...") He's a nice guy and the saviour of a large, noisy mob of boys... but also occasionally a bit touchy-feely and you wouldn't have been surprised had the film revealed him to be a paedophile.

(b) a drunken Doctor Ahu (Jin Hoon) who gives money to underage girls. This almost certainly has no sexual connotations. He's just generous. We like him. When one of our sibling protagonists is about to be sold by the criminals who'd bought her, that's far more disturbing... and Doctor Ahu gives her somewhere to stay and even offers to train her as a nurse. Considering her likely fates at that point, he might even have saved her life. Nonetheless, again, you could imagine a darker film doing things with this.

The film's not a million miles away from social realism, apart from the happy ending. It's so sentimental and moralistic that even a criminal gang gives its money to help orphans. Uh-huh. Overall, though, the film's perfectly okay. The child actors are effective, especially when we're watching a mob of boys. Seong-bin and Ahu did a good thing and will have saved a lot of children. (Child labour laws? No such thing, shhh.) Apparently, this is regarded as one of the best Korean films made under Japanese occupation, which I can believe. You could do a lot worse.

SEONG-BIN: "My dear, your brother said we can use the barn and the villa as well. I'm so grateful."

SEONG-BIN'S WIFE: "How could he? He must have been drunk."