AllMovie

Kim Kyung-Mook wrote, directed, edited and designed this surreal comedy-drama which offers a wildly impressionistic glimpse at the changing shape of life in South Korea. The Cheonggyecheon River, which runs through Seoul, is the symbolic diving line between North and South Korea, and for years the river was notoriously polluted, a dangerous and ugly cesspool of natural and man-made waste. During Lee Myung-Bak's tenure as mayor of Seoul, he made cleaning up Cheonggyecheon a pet project, and the revitalized river has become a touring attraction in the city. But while the Cheonggyecheon looks significantly better, many of the same pollutants still lurk beneath its surface, and many regard the river as a fitting metaphor for a nation still coming to terms with its most serious problems. A transsexual (Park Ji-Hwan) midway through the transformation from man to woman has been contemplating how the "New Seoul" is quickly rising from the city's detritus while strolling by the river, where s/he encounters a talking dog. The two strike up a conversation, and soon the dog is guiding the stranger through a strange, bifurcated world, where the male side of his personality sees Seoul one way and the female side sees something else altogether. A Cheonggyecheon Dog (the title is a play on Luis Bunuel's classic experimental film An Andalusian Dog) was an official selection at the 2009 Rotterdam International Film Festival.