CACrown ArchivesThe cinema collection
Menu
Research dossier · Arts & Letters

My Way (2011 film)

2011 South Korean war film by Kang Je-gyu

Manuscripts, fine bindings, an engraving plate and preserved performance ephemera
Arts and lettersInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 7, 2026
Entity authorityQ487492 ↗
Source-derived summary

My Way (Korean: 마이 웨이) is a 2011 South Korean epic war film produced, co-written and directed by Kang Je-gyu. It stars Jang Dong-gun, alongside Japanese actor Joe Odagiri and Chinese actress Fan Bingbing. Set before and during World War II, the film follows a pair of rival marathon runners, one Korean and the other Japanese, who befriend each other as they are conscripted across the war's different fronts.

My Way is based on the story of Yang Kyoungjong, a Korean conscript who allegedly served in the Imperial Japanese Army, the Red Army, and the Wehrmacht before being captured by the United States Army during Operation Overlord. The film is one of the most expensive to have ever been produced in South Korea, with a budget of ₩28 billion (US$24 million).

The film was released in South Korea on 21 December 2011, but performed poorly at the box office due to high competition and received generally mixed reviews from critics.

Plot

In 1928, Kim Jun-shik (Shin Sang-yeob) works alongside his father (Chun Ho-jin) and sister Eun-soo (Lee Yeon-hee) on the farm of the Hasegawa family (Shiro Sano, Kumi Nakamura) in Gyeong-seong (present-day Seoul), Japanese-occupied Korea. Jun-shik and Tatsuo Hasegawa (Sung Yu-bin) are interested in running. When they are teenagers (Do Ji-han, Yukichi Kobayashi), they have become fierce competitors. Tatsuo's grandfather (Isao Natsuyagi) is killed in a bombing by a Korean freedom fighter, and Korean runner Sohn Kee-chung (Yoon Hee-won) wins a marathon race against Japanese competitors, further inflaming already-tense Korean–Japanese tensions.

Editorial summary

“My Way (2011 film)” enters the record as 2011 South Korean war film by Kang Je-gyu. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what film, South and Korean can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA productive route into publication, performance and collection histories when the underlying object or edition remains clearly identified. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2011, 1928—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 2011-01-01. Its strongest next move is a source search built around film, South and Korean.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“My Way (2011 film)” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, film, South and Korean provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q487492. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2011 and 1928.

Critical limits

Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.

Best used for
  • Identifying works and editions
  • Tracing reception history
  • Finding collection records
Verify next

The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “My Way (2011 film)”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow My Way (2011 film) primary sources, My Way (2011 film) archive and film research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “My Way (2011 film)”?
  2. Which edition, object, performance or recording is being described?
  3. How did later circulation or interpretation alter the work’s reception?
Subject index

Search terms from this dossier

Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “My Way (2011 film)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.