- Siblings Su-min and Dong-min trade their grandmother's shoes for a puppy they discover at the market. When the mortally ill old woman is admitted to the hospital and pines for her lost footwear, the two children feel guilty.
- Two children from rural South Korea, Sun-mi, the older sister, and Dong-min, her younger brother, want a puppy from a street market so badly they trade in a whole lot of seemingly useless items from their household, among them a pair of ornamented shoes belonging to the kids' grandmother living with their family. The shoes were a gift from the kid's mother, the daughter-in-law to the grandmother. The two women don't seem to get along very well, the grandmother never wore those shoes. But then the siblings return from the street market, there's an ambulance in front of their home, taking the seriously ill grandmother to a hospital. The mother is looking for the ornamented shoes, because her mother-in-law wants them. So the children hurry back to the street market just to find the trader from whom they got the puppy has already left. They learn that he only took the really valuable things he got from them with him and dumped the rest. So they siblings go to the dump looking for the shoes, which they can see through a hole in pile of trash. But then they try to reach the shoes they fall through the hole and wake up in a world between life and death.
A group of four "kokdu", spirits who accompany the souls of the deceased to the other side, approach the children. They are a guide to lead the way, a guard to protect the deceased, a caregiver to provide food and beverages, and an entertainer for amusement. It turns out that this is the first assignment to this team, and that it very unusual to trust such inexperienced "kokdu" with deceased children. But Sun-mi and Dong-min hearing about this are not giving them a hard time and seem to accept their fate. So they start their journey through lovely flower gardens to the river that separates the world of the dead from the world of the living. Just before the children are about to cross that river, the kokdu learn about the big mistake they are about to make- it is the grandmother whom they should accompany to the after-world, not the children. But this way the grandchildren get the chance to bid a last farewell to their grandmother.
The movie is an adaptation of a play performed at the National Gugak Center, which is dedicated to the preservation of traditional Korean theater and dance. The Gugak Center's theater becomes the world between life and death, allowing the watchers of the movie a view behind the scenes that the audience at the theater won't get.
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By what name was Kokdu: A Story of Guardian Angels (2018) officially released in Canada in English?
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