Francisca, Tobias, Sara, David and Frederic are students at the Swiss University of St. Gallen. Each from different backgrounds, they are studying for a degree that the Financial Times has dubbed the “best program in management worldwide.” They all have the same goal: to excel in a career prominently featuring money and power.
The director closely follows these young adults for seven years, from a headhunter interview to their individual successes and setbacks as consultants or entrepreneurs. He asks them about their dreams and ambitions, goes with them on vacations or out to dinner, visits their parents, spends time with them as they prepare for job interviews, and works overtime with them in a hotel room.
Crystal-clear editing tells five stories of five different people, each with their own uncertainties, euphoric moments, fears and heartbreak. Sadder and wiser, at the end of the film they look back on their initial enthusiasm and reflect on how much of it is left at this point in their lives. Through their uninhibited gaze, the audience gets a glimpse of a world that is familiar to only to a few.
源自:https://festival.idfa.nl/en/film/2ef01ca7-b887-461e-b601-50f0b48fe7ac/the-driven-ones/
More than once, the protagonists in Mimang wonder where they are and where they’re going—it is a concrete, geographical question born from walking around the streets of Seoul, but as the film progresses, that urban journey also proves to be an existential one. We accompany the characters in some stretches of their path—many years separate each of the episodes that make up the film, and that distance reveals changes through what remains. This is not a film about earthquakes, but about small transformations, and the marks of time can be seen not only in the actors’ bodies, but also in that other omnipresent protagonist that is Seoul, whose vitality invades every shot. Like others before him (it’s inevitable to think about Truffaut or Linklater), here, Kim Taeyang reminds us that cinema is the best time machine that has been invented so far.