General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Ticket (티켓)

Ticket (티켓; also romanized Tiket) is a 1986 South Korean drama directed by Im Kwon-taek, set in a 'ticket dabang' (티켓 다방), a coffeehouse where waitresses sold sexual services on the side, in the port town of Seokcho on Korea's east coast. It was released on August 23, 1986, runs 108 minutes, and stars Kim Ji-mee as the madam Ji-sook, with Jeon Se-yeong, Lee Hye-young, Ahn So-young, Myeong Hui, and Park Keun-hyong.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director / screenplay	Im Kwon-taek; screenplay by Song Gil-han¹^•³
Release	August 23, 1986, South Korea; 108 minutes; 35 mm color¹^•⁴
Production	Jimee Films, the company founded by star Kim Ji-mee; her first film as producer²
Setting	A 'ticket dabang' in Seokcho, Gangwon Province, where waitresses sold coffee and, in exchange for a ticket, sexual services²^•³
Admissions	81,236⁵
Award	Paeksang Arts Awards 1987, Film Awards, Best Actress¹
Restoration	Preserved and digitally restored in 2K by the Korean Film Archive (KOFA); a 1080p restoration is streamed free on KOFA's YouTube channel⁶^•⁷

Spoilers

Plot and characters

Min Ji-sook (Kim Ji-mee) runs a ticket dabang in Seokcho and hires three new waitresses through an employment agency: Miss Yang (Ahn So-young), Miss Hong (Lee Hye-young), and Se-yeong (Jeon Se-yeong). Miss Yang and Miss Hong are experienced in coaxing customers toward the establishment's sideline; Miss Yang dreams of becoming an actress, while Miss Hong struggles with her father's medical expenses. Se-yeong, the youngest, nicknamed 'Rookie', is new to the work. Her father is sick at home, and she wants to help her student boyfriend Min-su pay for his studies, but she refuses customers' demands for the extra services, to Ji-sook's growing frustration as business falls off. The older Miss Ju (Myeong Hui) has spent three years at the establishment while her debt keeps rising as she supports her son.²^•⁸

Se-yeong grows close to Captain Park (Yun Yang-ha), a ship captain who comforts her, and eventually gives herself to him and asks him to find Min-su a job. When Min-su comes to Seokcho, sees how she actually lives, and returns to denounce her morality and break off the relationship, Ji-sook, who had once supported an imprisoned husband before falling into bar work herself, begs him not to abandon Se-yeong. When he refuses, she pushes him into the sea, goes insane, and is confined to a psychiatric hospital; the waitresses then set out on new paths in life.⁸^•⁵

Production

Kim Ji-mee as producer. Kim Ji-mee, one of Korea's leading stars of the 1960s and early 1970s, staged a comeback in the 1980s by founding the production company Jimee Films, and Ticket was its founding work and her first film as producer. It followed just four months after her previous collaboration with Im, Gilsotteum (1986), for which she received strong reviews.²^•⁷ Kim said she made the film because she wanted to expose a place where human rights were traded for a single ticket.⁷

Director Im and Kim researched the film by interviewing women working in real ticket dabangs in Seokcho, a process that becomes a small part of the film's own narrative.²

Censorship and restored versions

The film's content fell afoul of the censors, who demanded that several parts be excised before release.² After the Motion Picture Promotion Corporation, the predecessor of the Korean Film Council, announced its "'86 Good Film" selection, further scenes were cut from the theatrical release print. KOFA's 2017 Cinematheque screening presented a version re-edited to restore some of those scenes; this version runs 115 minutes, against the 108 minutes listed for the film in the KOFA database and the 100 minutes recorded by Cine21.⁹^•¹^•⁵

Place in Im Kwon-taek's career

Im Kwon-taek, born in 1934, debuted with Farewell to the Duman River in 1962 and spent nearly two decades turning out genre films before finding a social voice in the 1980s.⁴ In that decade he turned to stories of women in a cycle that included Village in the Mist (1983), Gilsotteum (1986), Ticket (1986), The Surrogate Womb (1987), and Adada (1987).² The Busan International Film Festival's 2013 retrospective program note calls Ticket one of the darkest films in his body of work and groups it with Gilsoddeum as a controversial work in which the outward narrative includes and collides with a latent pathological energy.⁴ A comparative study places it against Kenji Mizoguchi's Street of Shame, noting that where Mizoguchi views his prostitutes with a sympathetic gaze, Im focuses on his women while looking at the Korean social structures outside the frame that trap them in prostitution.¹⁰ The critic Tony Rayns, writing for the San Francisco Film Festival, described its blend of social realism, metaphor, and heightened drama as central to Im's style and compared it to Mizoguchi's Street of Shame.⁶

Reception and later screenings

The film drew 81,236 admissions in South Korea.⁵ Kim Ji-mee won the 1987 Paeksang Arts Awards Best Actress prize.¹ It has since been screened in retrospectives including the Busan International Film Festival's Korean Cinema Retrospectives of 2010 and 2013, a Jeonju International Film Festival special focus in 2017, and the 2019 London Korean Film Festival's "A Century of Korean Cinema".¹ KOFA restored the film in 2K and streams it with English subtitles on its Korean Classic Film Theater YouTube channel, which it launched in 2012.⁶^•¹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 1980s › Released 1986 to 1989

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

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