Our Beloved Summer|Choongang High School — The Red-Brick Year They Promised Never to Meet Again

The school sits on a Gye-dong hill above Changdeokgung, a Gothic stone tower and two red-brick halls that have been teaching boys since 1908. VisitKorea names Choongang High School as the campus Choi Ung and Kook Yeon-su shared, the place the documentary later turned into public property.

You cannot walk the classrooms. You can stand at the gate and read the brick. The main hall went up in 1937 after a fire took the 1917 building. Students from this yard walked into the June 10 Independence Movement. The drama borrowed that gravity without announcing it. Two teenagers film each other here, then spend a decade trying not to.

The tower catches late light the way it did when the camera did. A gingko older than the republic stands northeast of the library. The street below runs toward Bukchon in a few hundred metres. The year they promised never to meet again is still written on this slope. You leave with the gate, not the plot.