General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Take Care of My Cat (고양이를 부탁해)

Take Care of My Cat (고양이를 부탁해, Goyangireul Butakhae) is a 2001 South Korean coming-of-age drama film and the feature debut of director Jeong Jae-eun. It follows five young women in Incheon in the year after their high-school graduation as their friendship frays under the pressures of work, class, and housing insecurity, with a stray kitten named Teetee passing between them as the thread that keeps the group connected.¹

Key fact	Detail
Original release	October 13, 2001, South Korea²
Director and writers	Directed by Jeong Jae-eun; screenplay by Jeong Jae-eun and Park Ji-sung³
Cast	Bae Doona (Tae-hee), Lee Yo-won (Hae-joo), Ok Ji-young (Ji-young), Lee Eun-sil and Lee Eun-ju (twins Bi-ryu and Ohn-jo)³
Runtime and genre	112 minutes; drama, youth film, social film³
Initial box office	About 50,000 admissions by late December 2001, after an early end to its theatrical run⁴
Festival honors	Competition selection at the 31st Rotterdam International Film Festival and the Forum section of the 59th Berlin International Film Festival; MBC Film Awards new director prize and a Rotterdam special mention⁴^•⁵
Later releases	4K remaster re-released October 13, 2021 for the 20th anniversary; Kani Releasing planned a 25th-anniversary North American theatrical return for summer 2026⁶^•¹

Spoilers

Plot and characters

The film is set in the industrial port city of Incheon and follows five friends who have just turned twenty. Hae-joo (Lee Yo-won) joins a brokerage firm in Seoul and nurtures ambitions of becoming a successful career woman, though at work she is limited to errands. Ji-young (Ok Ji-young), who has a talent for art and dreams of studying textile design abroad, lives with her elderly grandparents in a crumbling house in a hillside neighborhood and is repeatedly turned away from jobs. Tae-hee (Bae Doona) works without pay at the sauna her father runs, types out the poems of a poet with cerebral palsy she met through volunteer work, and dreams of becoming a sailor. The twins Bi-ryu and Ohn-jo (Lee Eun-sil and Lee Eun-ju) live on their own and sell handmade jewelry on the street.³^•²^•⁷

Hae-joo's changing circumstances strain her friendship with Ji-young, who is disappointed in her and grows closer to Tae-hee; the calls simply become rarer and meetings harder as their lives diverge.¹⁴ The kitten Teetee, a stray that Ji-young takes in, is handed from one to another, with each friend in turn telling the next "take care of my cat." A Korean academic study of Incheon's screen image reads this relay as the film's central gesture: what the characters are really asking each other to look after is themselves.⁷

Production and style

Jeong Jae-eun wrote and directed the film as her feature debut, produced by Oh Ki-min's company Masulpiri Pictures, with cinematography by Choi Young-hwan and editing by Lee Hyun-mi.³ Jeong was a first-generation graduate of the Korea National University of Arts film school; her graduation short Night of Two (1999) won the best work award at the Videowon Festival, and she had earlier won the top prize at the Seoul Women's Film Festival with the short Diary of June. She has said the title came from her own experience raising a cat, whose hesitation at the window, between the domesticated life of the house and the wild life outside, gave her a figure for twenty-year-old women.²

Two stylistic choices drew attention at the time. Text messages and typewritten pages appear as on-screen subtitles rather than spoken dialogue, and the five leads, several of them new to film, were praised for performances that read like a documentary of real people. Reviewers also noted the film's decision to center ordinary female vocational high-school graduates from Incheon's outskirts, and its contrast between the city's commercial districts and back alleys, populated with figures such as female office workers, kimchi-factory women, and Southeast Asian laborers.²^•⁴

Release and reception

The film opened in South Korea on October 13, 2001 and performed poorly commercially, leaving theaters early despite a favorable critical response. A volunteer "save Take Care of My Cat" campaign, joined by figures including the singer Cho Young-nam and general audiences, formed to extend its run; by late December 2001 it had drawn about 50,000 admissions and was scheduled to screen until January 25, 2002. Together with Waikiki Brothers, it became associated with a movement to rescue low-budget art films, and the two films gave the year's top two debut features in Cine 21's critics' poll, with Oh Ki-min named producer of the year.⁴^•⁸^•⁹

Abroad, the film was released in the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, and Hong Kong. It competed at the 31st Rotterdam International Film Festival, where it received a special mention, and was invited to the Forum section of the 59th Berlin International Film Festival; Jeong won the new director award at the MBC Film Awards.⁵^•⁴ In the United States, Kino International opened it on October 18, 2002; it earned $3,137 in its domestic opening and $9,866 overall in the US, with a recorded worldwide gross of $64,591 including a 2021 South Korean re-release.¹⁰

Re-releases and standing

For the film's 20th anniversary, a 4K digital remaster was re-released in South Korea on October 13, 2021, with Bae Doona, Lee Yo-won, and Ok Ji-young joining anniversary events. Advance booking scores on major chains exceeded 9 out of 10, and coverage noted that viewers born in 2001, the age of the film's characters, were among those finding it resonant, with comments calling it a "classic of youth."⁶^•¹¹ In 2026, the North American distributor Kani Releasing acquired rights from Barunson E&A for a 25th-anniversary theatrical return, scheduled for July 17, 2026.¹^•¹⁰

The film's reputation has grown well past its initial run. Korean commentary places it as a rare work in the lineage of Korean youth films for its portrait of friendship among women in their twenties, and festival retrospectives have highlighted its capture of early-2000s urban life in Incheon, filmed in locations including Dongincheon Station, Chinatown, Manseok-dong, and the old coastal railway.¹²^•¹³ Jeong herself has described it as a film about housing, noting that independent living has remained difficult for young people in Korea both then and now.⁶

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026