Bang Woo-ri’s debut feature sends Kim You-jung to spy on a boy for her best friend and lets the plan go wrong, in a coming-of-age story built on the last months of the twentieth century.

A favour, a name tag and the wrong boy

The year is 1999 and Na Bo-ra, played by Kim You-jung, is seventeen, loud, loyal and a taekwondo practitioner at a high school in Cheongju. Her best friend Kim Yeon-du, played by Roh Yoon-seo, has a heart condition and a flight booked to the United States for surgery, and she suddenly refuses to go: she has fallen for a boy she met in a neighbourhood shop. Bo-ra strikes a deal. Yeon-du will get on the plane, and Bo-ra will find out everything about the boy and report back by email.

The boy, as far as anyone knows, is Baek Hyun-jin, played by Park Jung-woo, because that is the name stitched on the jacket he was wearing. Bo-ra’s plan is to get to him through his best friend, Pung Woon-ho, played by Byeon Woo-seok, and to do that she auditions for the school broadcasting club the two boys are said to be joining. Only Woon-ho turns up. What follows is the comedy of a surveillance operation run by a teenager with no talent for subtlety, and then something less comic: Bo-ra and Woon-ho start to like each other, while the question of whose name was really on that jacket hangs over all of it.

Where the story comes from

20th Century Girl (20세기 소녀) is the first feature written and directed by Bang Woo-ri, and it is a personal one. The script grew out of her own teenage habit of exchanging diaries with a friend, and the film is set in Cheongju, the city in North Chungcheong Province where she grew up. It was shot there, on location, between October 2021 and January 2022, with local roads and the Chungbuk National University area closed off for filming days.

That origin explains a lot about the shape of the project. This is not a high-concept romance built around a twist for its own sake; the mistaken-identity device is the kind of misunderstanding that only works among teenagers who communicate through notes, rumours, borrowed jackets and the occasional email on a family computer. The friendship between Bo-ra and Yeon-du is the spine of the plot, and the romance grows out of an act of loyalty rather than the other way round.

The production came from Yong Film, with Syd Lim producing, Jo Yeong-jik as director of photography and a score by Dalpalan. The running time is 119 minutes, which is long for a teen romance, and the length is deliberate: the story does not stop at graduation but follows Bo-ra beyond 1999 into adulthood, with a present-day frame set in 2019.

The cast, before and after

Kim You-jung carries the film. She has been on Korean screens since early childhood, and audiences who grew up with television dramas know her from historical series such as Moon Embracing the Sun and Love in the Moonlight. In 20th Century Girl she shares the role of Bo-ra with Han Hyo-joo, who appears as the adult Bo-ra in a special appearance. It is not the first time the two actors have split a character between them: Kim played the young version of Han’s title role in the 2010 historical drama Dong Yi.

Byeon Woo-seok, a former model, was still a rising name when he played Woon-ho. The part earned him nominations for Best New Actor – Film at the 59th Baeksang Arts Awards and Best New Actor at the Buil Film Awards in 2023, and a year later the time-slip romance Lovely Runner turned him into one of the most in-demand leading men in Korea. Seen from 2026, 20th Century Girl is also a record of that ascent, one of his first leading film roles, before the fan meetings and the advertising campaigns.

Roh Yoon-seo had made her screen debut the same year in the drama series Our Blues, and Yeon-du was among her first major parts; Park Jung-woo completes the central quartet as the boy whose name sets the plot in motion. Around them, the film collects a long list of cameos: Gong Myung as a blind date who happens to share a name with Bo-ra’s first love, Ong Seong-wu as Woon-ho’s younger brother Joseph, and short appearances by Lee Beom-soo, Park Hae-joon and Ryu Seung-ryong, the last of them as a voice only. Kim Sung-kyung and Jeong Seok-yong play Bo-ra’s parents.

Why 1999 matters

The date in the title is not decoration. The story is set in the last months before the turn of the millennium, when the internet was arriving in Korean homes, emails replaced letters for long-distance friendships and rumours that the world would end at midnight on 31 December circulated among students. The film uses that calendar as a clock. Everything the characters say to each other has a deadline, and the title itself, which only fully makes sense by the end, refers to a girl who belongs to the twentieth century in someone’s memory.

That framing places Bang Woo-ri’s debut in a well-defined tradition of East Asian first-love cinema that looks back at the 1990s from the present. The Taiwanese hits You Are the Apple of My Eye and Our Times used a similar structure, adults recalling a school romance from the vantage point of the years after it, and in Korea the template runs through films such as Architecture 101 and Netflix‘s own Tune in for Love. 20th Century Girl does not hide those ties. Its ambition is to tell that familiar story from the point of view of a friendship between two girls, with the boys as the people the friendship has to survive.

A Netflix title from the start

The film was produced as a Netflix original and was part of the slate of 25 Korean titles the platform announced for 2022, alongside series such as Narco-Saints. It had its first public screening on 6 October 2022 at the 27th Busan International Film Festival, in the Korean Cinema Today – Special Premiere section, and arrived on Netflix worldwide on 21 October 2022. It is still on the service.

Its reach was immediate. A day after release it was seventh on Netflix’s global film ranking; in its first week it reached number two on the platform’s Top 10 for non-English films, with eight million hours viewed in three days, and it topped the charts in South Korea and Japan. Few Korean romances aimed at a young audience travel that far, and fewer do it without the fantasy or thriller hooks that usually carry Korean content abroad.

A closing thought

20th Century Girl is a film made for an audience that knows exactly what it wants from a story about first love: misunderstandings, a train station, a promise between friends and a time jump that turns a comedy into a memory. It does not pretend to reinvent that formula. What it offers instead is a director writing from her own diaries, a city outside Seoul and a cast that, a few years on, looks like a snapshot of Korean television’s next generation. Viewers who are allergic to sentimental teen romance have been warned by the premise itself; for the rest, it is worth knowing that a 2023 survey of overseas audiences by South Korea’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism ranked it fifth among the most-preferred Korean films of 2022.

Tags: Netflix, Kim You-jung

20th Century Girl: a Netflix first love born of a favour for a best friend in 1999

A favour, a name tag and the wrong boy

Where the story comes from

The cast, before and after

Why 1999 matters

A Netflix title from the start

A closing thought

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