'A Taxi Driver' audience tops 3 mln by 4th day

"A Taxi Driver," a South Korean film about the 1980 pro-democracy uprising in the southern city of Gwangju, has sold more than 3 million tickets by the fourth day of its release, data showed Saturday.

The film hit the 3-million mark on Saturday afternoon, according to the computerized box office tally from the Korean Film Council. The pace is on par with "Roaring Currents," the most-viewed film ever in South Korea that gathered 17.6 million.

The movie, starring Song Kang-ho and German actor Thomas Kretschmann, tells the story of a Seoul taxi driver named Man-seop who takes German reporter Jurgen Hinzpeter to Gwangju, some 330 kilometers south of Seoul, for a big money offer, and witnesses the horrors of the bloody military crackdown on the May 18 uprising.

Directed by Jang Hun, the film was written based on the true story told by Hinzpeter, who covered the tragedy of the Gwangju Democratization Movement of May 1980 and revealed the truth to the world as the military regime tried to conceal the bloody crackdown. (Yonhap)