Synopsis | Nineteen-year-old Chang-woo spends the final semester of his school years not in a classroom but on the floor of an unfamiliar small factory, working as an industrial intern. Even under the cold judgment of his supervisor, he discovers the joy of work and a sense of camaraderie with his coworkers, tasting all at once the excitement and fear of stepping into the working world — its sweetness and its bitterness.

But an unexpected farewell with a fellow worker makes Chang-woo hesitate, and pulls him a step back… The film follows the heart-pounding first steps that each of us once took: the final semester we all share, those uncertain beginnings filled with small courage and quiet hope.

Programmer's note | Whose youth is this, when a person can be made to feel so small simply because their lack of achievement? The film follows a 19-year-old man stepping into the world of labor for the first time. It closely stays to the ways society uses people, teaches them to endure, and eventually leads them to question even the measure of their own worth. Chang-woo enters the workplace without exceptional talent, impressive stats, or the privilege of having choices. Then, what the film holds onto is not a story of success, but the effort of someone trying to give his life a sense of meaning within a narrow set of options. For Chang-woo, labor becomes a time in which the scale of dignity begins to waver. A single word, a passing look, even the texture of the atmosphere can lift or sink his heart. Even so, he learns, endures, and lives on. The film sees Chang-woo’s pain as the weight of an era resting on an ordinary face. His time is marked by the feeling of being pushed toward nothingness. And on the opposite side, there lies the urge to escape that state and finally become something. These two opposing pressures meet in the face of a society that tests the dignity of a person’s very existence. It is here that the film asks its fundamental question: is a single day in a person’s life not already wide and deep enough to deserve all rights and respect, apart from dreams, luck, and achievement? The film leaves us imagining a society that learns the dignity of existence before it learns the scale of achievement, a society in which we begin to ask not what someone has become, but how they are living.