Based upon Dante's Inferno, 1/3 is a timeless fable of redemption, a gritty, streetwise contemporary thriller, and a poetic meditation on urban alienation. In his feature debut, director and co-writer Yong-man Kim ("Mr. Kim" of New York City's Kim's Video chain - the legendary and influential counter-culture cinema resource acknowledged by Quentin Tarantino in "Kill Bill") shows a masterful ability to poetically detail the private lives of city-dwelling loners while mapping the spiritual abyss of the human soul.
Within the cloister of a Lower East Side tenement apartment, Chris, a young Buddhist monk, lives an intentionally solitary and ascetic life. By day, Chris makes a meager living sketching charcoal portraits for tourists in Washington Square Park. By night, he cleanses himself of physical and emotional needs through routine, self- denial, and meditation. But when the monk accidentally discovers that he can see into his pretty high school student neighbor's apartment, he gets an unblinking view of un-fulfillable human desire at its most perverse. Lotusia, the object of his attention, is not the innocent she appears to be. Night after night, she works as a teen prostitute and numbly endures obscene physical cruelty and sexual humiliation at the hands of her clients. With Chris as her sole witness, Lotusia's degradations grow more intense and her efforts to free herself from a lifelong chain of cruelty grow increasingly desperate. As Chris' fascination threatens to become obsession, the young monk crosses the boundaries of his own personal purgatory to confront and experience the pain that presages wisdom.
