Polaroid 2026

"Like a photograph taken of someone you knew you were about to lose."

Directed by Son Byung-jo

Deok-jung, a taxi driver who speaks of death as casually as small talk, receives a terminal diagnosis. He buys a worn-out coffee vending machine — a mirror of himself — and sets out to find meaning in whatever time he has left. At a cheap lodging house, he crosses paths with Jeong-suk, a down-on-her-luck karaoke hostess past her prime. Moved by something he can't quite name, he offers her a deal: look after the machine, and he'll call it a relationship. Bound together by hardship and loneliness, the two begin to quietly tend to each other's wounds, and what started as a contract slowly becomes something neither expected. Before he goes, Deok-jung leaves Jeong-suk the vending machine as his final bequest — and in that rusted, weathered thing, she finds a reason to begin again.