Recently, films from the late Japanese colonial period, previously known only through oral accounts, have been discovered overseas and made available to the public. These films and their vivid imagery offer valuable insights into late colonial Korean society that are difficult to derive from traditional documents, creating an evocative sense of encountering individuals from that historical period firsthand. However, for researchers accustomed to working with text-based sources, these visual materials and the information they convey, though rich, remain unfamiliar. This raises important questions about how to approach such films as historical sources that reveal the past.

As our era increasingly turns to visual sources to understand history, these questions become especially relevant for scholars. This article offers an analysis of the film Homeless Angel, approaching it not simply as a piece of cinema history but as a historical document. Although fictional, film, like written records, can serve as a valuable resource for examining past realities, as demonstrated in the pioneering work of Marc Ferro. However, because film does not simply present reality as it was, scholars must consider both the reality depicted on screen and the underlying context influencing its portrayal. Through an examination of Homeless Angel, this article explores what the film reveals about social work and the circumstances faced by orphans in the final years of the colonial period.

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