City Dreams

Le Sang re-enacts the utopia of the Living Theater, a theatrical company founded in 1947 and boasting collective creation, the liberation of bodies (the actors played naked) and the counterculture. But happiness is dangerous and the utopia mortal: Leon drowns in the dance, believing to find freedom.

Millowner Lem Bassett uses his foreman, Dave Trask, whose power among the people in the neighborhood is great, to obtain their land so that he can build a bigger dam for water power, flooding the lands above it. One of these people finds that Bassett has tricked him, and he demands recompense. When it is refused, Dave leads a group of men to dynamite the dam. In the path of the waters is Bassett's home, where Dave's crippled daughter has been taken so that a famous specialist retained by Tom Bassett, nephew of Lem (who loves Dave's sister), may operate. Dave saves the child and Tom, and Bassett agrees to surrender.

An oil tanker burns at sea, and Molla Hansen, the captain's daughter, is the only survivor. Her rescuer, lighthouse-keeper Silas Martin, is fatally burned, and begs Molla to look after his daughter, Pearl. Meanwhile, Captain Rodney O'Malley, Molla's grief-stricken fiancé, departs on a long cruise. Two years later, Pearl is seduced by rum-runner Charley Watts, although she blames engineer Ira Meers. Molla learns of Pearl's pregnancy and holds Ira at gunpoint in the lighthouse. When Pearl discovers that Charley is already married, she locks him in the lighthouse tower, floods it with gas, and hurls a lighted lantern at him. Pearl and Charley are killed, but Ira recovers. The explosion signals Rod's ship, and he and Molla are reunited.

A middle-class South Korean family where the father is fired from his job of 18 years, the mother feels pressure to be a top salesperson, and the daughter struggles to get into college, attempts to find a new meaning of success.