Ah-sim married the president of the company where her father used to work, but is mistreated by her mother-in-law for not coming from a well-off family. Yet Ah-sim’s mother affection for her daughter runs so deep that she sells her best clothing to buy some buckwheat flour to make ‘muk (jelly)’ to send to her in-law. In the meantime, Ah-sim’s husband faces the possibility of his company’s bankruptcy, and turns to his ex-fiancee for a loan. With this as an excuse, his mother and maternal aunt plot to expel Ah-sim from the family and replace her with the ex-fiancee. Having caught wind of this conspiracy, Ah-sim’s mother decides to appeal directly to the ex-fiancee and explain the situation, but ends up accidentally committing a crime.
 A ‘motherhood melodrama’, Mother constructs the main conflict by presenting different stereotypes of mothers deeply rooted in Korean society - the ‘endlessly sacrificing mother’ and the ‘greedy and ill-tempered mother-in-law’. While family, motherhood and love are all intricately involved, eventually the ones who summoned to court are the poor mother and the abandoned old ex-fiancee, the two most precariously situated in a modern society of capitalism and free love. However, out of sympathy with the universal experiences of women and mother, the ex-fiancee tells a different story in court. Her false testimony, made with the silent assent with the other women in the court, has the effect of disrupting the male dominated system which forces a mother to commit a crime. (Kwon Eun-sun)