“The Confession” is a Korean Christian short film, directed by John La Raw from Myanmar. You can watch it on YouTube for free, and I’ll embed the video below:

The film was dedicated to “The Year of Mercy” and received five International film festival awards so far, and nominated in various International film festivals.

If you haven’t watched it, I invite you to do so and share your opinion about it in the comments section below or in the video’s comments section on YouTube.

To summarize the plot of the movie (spoilers ahead): “The Confession” tells the story of a young priest who listens as an elderly man confesses to the sin of involuntary manslaughter he committed twenty years ago. The elderly man is riddled with guilt and visibly pained by the choice he made to flee the scene and avoid the police after having hit a man with his car while returning home from a party where he had consumed alcohol. When asked why he decided to confess this sin this late, the elderly man states that he has end-stage cancer and doesn’t have much time left to live. As the details of the man’s crime continue to unfold, the priest suddenly realizes that he has a very personal connection to the story: the victim was his father and he, the priest, had witnessed his father’s death from the sidewalk. The priest recalls through several flashbacks how he had cried over his father body and had pleaded in vain for someone to help his father while the drunk driver never stopped to take his father to the hospital. Enraged, the priest confronts the elderly penitent man and when the latter collapses because of his poor health condition, the priest helps him take a seat in the church and tells him to rest while he goes to pray. Kneeling before the cross of Jesus Christ, the priest says The Lord’s Prayer and cries. He then returns to the elderly man and tells him that he forgives him, that he offers him absolution of his sin. When the elderly man retorts, stating that he doesn’t deserve his forgiveness, the priest tells him that he should not be so hard on himself and that his (the priest’s) father had not died in that accident, but rather he was taken to the hospital by someone else and he had survived. Relieved by the thought that he is not a murderer, the man rejoices and offers to pay back for all the compensations to the priest’s father, but the priest informs him that his father had recently died and advises the elderly man to give money to charitable causes, a thing that the elderly man agrees to do. The next scene shows the priest returning home and taking his father’s photo as tears fill his eyes. He addresses his father’s photo and asks for his forgiveness because he had lied to the elderly penitent man about the fact that he (the priest’s father) had survived the accident.