It all started with a bowl of beef and radish soup. Every morning, elderly trash pickers U-sik and Hyeon-jung roam the back alleys of Seoul looking for cardboard they can recycle for cash as neighborhood “vegetable lady” Hwa-jin looks on. Initially at odds with one another, the trio soon learns that they have a lot in common: miniscule pensions, ungrateful children and never enough food to go around. Hyeon-jung has his house, at least, so he invites his new friends over for some soup. There, U-sik proposes a scheme: what if they went to a BBQ restaurant and just didn’t pay the bill? Reinvented as the infamous “dine and dash trio,” the three go on a culinary crime spree that renews their taste for life.

People and Meat casts an affectionate eye on the seniors’ dine-and-dash antics, scoring their petty theft with suspenseful music and filming their escapes like action sequences. But there’s an undercurrent of tragedy to their dilemma, particularly as the friends open up about their pasts and their struggles to stay alive. What kind of society neglects its elders to the point that they can’t afford meat? That’s the question in this tragicomic look at aging in contemporary Korea.—Frédéric Boyer

Jong-hyun Yang