“Hong Sangsoo’s films seize the material of everyday life in the service of exploring psychology and metaphysics in elegant, subtly profound ways” (Lincoln Center) as revealed in three double-bills and a recent film.
Read full descriptionA film school provides the appropriate landscape for this caustic look at cinema, relationships, and points of view. A “casually brilliant feat of storytelling, akin to an ingeniously wrought suite of literary short fiction” (New York Times).
BAMPFA Student Committee Pick
A film on two impromptu lovers and their suicide pact turns into another film entirely in Hong’s early deconstruction of narrative, reality, and cinema. “One of the filmmaker’s major touchstones” (New Yorker).
Four characters in search of a drink find themselves in the same bar again and again in Hong’s most Buñuelian take on the desire for human connection. “A soju-fueled cross between Last Year at Marienbad and Groundhog Day” (Artforum).
A literary office is the fitting setting as a philandering middle-aged publisher, his pissed-off wife, and a mystified new office assistant wonder if words can create reality—or take the edge off it anyway. “A lovely, intricately fractured story” (New York Times).
The beauty of Korea’s Kangwon vacation hotspot desperately competes with the vainglory of its visitors in Hong’s philosophical diptych on modern love and loneliness. “A coolly bracing drama of the mysterious bonds of lovers” (Richard Brody, New Yorker).
BAMPFA Student Committee Pick
The fine line between love and missed connection is played then replayed in this story of a traveling film director and the young painter he befriends during one long day’s journey into an inevitably soju-tainted evening.
A former actress returns to Seoul to reconnect with her past. “Intimate and fluid . . . [a] serenely passionate deployment of art as resistance to mortality” (Richard Brody, New Yorker).