One of the pioneering figures of modern Korean cinema, Yoo Hyeon-Mok (b. 1925) anticipated and complimented the search of the Young Sang Sidae directors for a wholly new film language with his radical breakthrough film Aimless Bullet (1961) and late career masterworks such as Flame, which earned Yoo a coveted Daejoong Film Award, South Korea’s equivalent of the Oscar. In Flame, Yoo makes daring use of jagged first-person flashbacks to reanimate 20th century Korea’s traumatic history of colonial subjugation through the dark paranoia and confused past of a mysterious, unidentified soldier wandering through a barren mountainscape and struggling to understand the violence and betrayal that made him a fugitive.