Attempting to distance herself from a painful breakup with her married professor, Jisook (Yun-hong Oh) joins two of her girlfriends (Sunyoung Im and Hyunyoung Park) for a holiday in South Korea’s Kangwon Province. But in an eerie twist of fate, her former lover, Sangkwon (Jong-hak Baek), plans a getaway for the same destination, where tragedy brings them together once again.
A regular on the international festival circuit, Hong Sang-soo is one of Korea’s most highly regarded contemporary directors. His mostly improvised, innovatively constructed films conceal rich layers of meaning beneath deceptively simple surfaces, and reveal a filmmaker with a unique, individual style. A rather notorious figure on the Seoul film scene, Hong has a fondness for alcohol that is almost as legendary as his talent for filmmaking. He’s been known to get familiar with his actors before shooting by taking them on drinking binges, and, for verisimilitude, the many drinking scenes in his films normally include actually drunk performers (who sometimes don’t remember these scenes after they’ve been shot).
Born in 1960, Hong began his film studies at Joongang University in Korea, then moved to the United States, where he received his BFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts and his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His debut feature, The Day a… read more
If the very young Hong still seems a little over-bearing in his character beats, social satire or visual motifs he more than makes up for it with an eccentric sense of rhythm and structural sense that clearly marks him as a master...with his switch to video Hong will become more fearless, and even more idiosyncratic, and this film is not as good as either TURNING GATE or DAY THE PIG, but is worthwhile nonetheless...
