In director YU Ha’s autobiographical film Spirit of Jeet Kune Do, what might appear as a traditional coming of age film slowly creeps up on you with a kick to the backside. First love, tension with parents, a violent school environment, sexual temptation: These familiar storylines and elements are the basis for many a film dealing with teenagers. The director volunteers to be a meticulous record keeper for the late-1970s Korean school culture. Bruce Lee’s battle cry and nunchuks, Abba's catchy melodies, racy sex comics, dance halls, midnight radio and so on. These cultural icons are extremely personal to the director, and they are used to create a shared space of experience for those who lived their adolescence at that time. In some respects Spirit of Jeet Kune Do is a cultural analysis for this group. However, the rosy nostalgia of the film is not limited what is seen in it. Our hero, Hyun-soo, slowly transforms into a monster closely resembling Bruce Lee’s macho persona. The film begins with the kids watching Bruce Lee’s Fist of Fury in a cinema, and Hyun-soo’s bloody fight on the school rooftop is the climax of the film. Hyun-soo imitating Bruce Lee in front a cinema is how the film ends. In the Spirit of Jeet Kune Do, school represents a place where (to quote a line from one of the director’s poems) the “most effective way of destroying imagination” is the use of a transcendental physical image. Bruce Lee’s incarnated fantasy is used demolish the reality of a rugged adolescence. How cruel and rough were our schools? The strong messages delivered in this film are unavoidable but more astonishingly, the subject matter is relevant today. (KIM Hyung-suk)