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TRACE

By Jae-Rim HAN

Action/Adventure - Development

With its captivating story and jaw-dropping action sequences, Trace will mark the first Korean superhero action film that signals the new beginning of the history of Korean blockbusters.

- Genres
- Action/Adventure
- Countries
- KOREA (South)
- Budget
- 5 - 10 M$
- Duration
- 120 mn
- Director(s)
- Jae-Rim HAN
- Writer(s)
- Jae-Rim HAN
- Producer(s)
- Syd LIM, Woo-Sik SEO
- Synopsis
- After spending many years abroad, Yoon-sung returns to Korea, his native country, to attend a party celebrating the success of a new cancer medicine developed by his father’s pharmaceutical company that might bring forth the complete cure for cancer. On their way back home after the happy family reunion, Yoon-sung and his father are assaulted in a parking lot by an unidentified person with a superhuman power and speed. Yoon-sung’s father dies in the assault, and Yoon-sung falls into coma. After many days spent in hospital, Yoon-sung wakes up from the coma and is shocked to find himself having turned into one of the superhuman kind called ‘Trace’. He is clueless as to how he gained the supernatural power. Suspicious of the cursory closure of the investigations into his father’s death, Yoon-sung takes matters into his own hands and starts to investigate the case himself. Digging up the intentionally buried clues, he finds out that another ‘Trace’ named Hee-sup is involved in the assault on his father and himself. Hee-sup, full of resentment toward the world after losing his son in an accident, attempts to kill Yoon-sung by any and all means. Yoon-sung, in order to protect himself from Hee-sup’s repeated assaults, has no choice but to bring out his hidden supernatural power to its extreme. In order to figure out how he became a ‘Trace’ and why Hee-sup, his fellow ‘Trace’, desperately wants to kill him, Yoon-sung realizes that the truth regarding his father’s death is the key to all his questions. He comes to find out about the conspiracy involving a huge pharmaceutical conglomerate and realizes that he and Hee-sup have had something to do with it in their past. Now he must confront the shocking truth that unveils itself.
  DIRECTOR’S PROFILE
  Born in 1975, HAN Jae-rim graduated from the Seoul Institute of the Arts in 1998. He started his film career in 2003 as screenwriter and assistant director for Natural City directed by MIN Byung-chun. In 2003, HAN won the Best Screenplay at the Korean Film Council Screenplay Contest with Rules of Dating, which he co-wrote and made his debut as a director in 2005. The film won a number of awards including Best New Director at the prestigious Grand Bell Film Awards and Best Screenplay at the Blue Dragon Awards, and screened at a number of festivals including in competition at the Tokyo International Film Festival. HAN made his second feature film The Show Must Go on starring SONG Kang-ho in 2007 and was praised for having innovated the ‘Korean Film Noir’ genre. The film was invited to San Sebastian International Film Festival and won Best Film at the Korean Film Critics Association Awards and at Blue Dragon Awards. He is acclaimed as one of the most representative directors of the new generation of Korean cinema.
  DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
  What is power? And what does it mean to have a power that other people do not have?
  Trace deals with the story of a man who tragically loses his family and then happens to gain a prodigious supernatural power. I would like to portray how he confronts the truth that unveils itself little by little in an intense and fast-paced style.
  Trace is a film that signals the beginning of the superhero genre in Korea. Based on the hugely popular web-cartoon by the same title from 2008, featuring a combination of fascinating superheroes never before seen in Korea, Trace will explore new frontiers of the Sci-Fi Action genre in terms of story and visual effects.
  The superheroes in Trace are unique in the sense that they have ordinary human minds and, at the same time, the utmost destructive power. Trace will be regarded as a groundbreaking film in the history of Korean action blockbusters.
- Partners & financing
- PPP Goal: Fund raising