A middle-aged couple visit a temple, where they had spent their first night together thirty years previously. On their way back, the woman realises she has likely left her phone there and insists on recovering it. This begins the winter’s night, one plunged in the shared, or separate, past of what forms the heart of a couple. At the beginning of the film, the subject’s triviality is conveyed by a rather naturalistic treatment, but this only serves to subsequently produce a stronger twist and gently shift the film towards a starker viewpoint that reveals the underpinnings of love’s discourse, and its memory. The subtle undramatic acting intentionally clouds the rules of the sentimental game, never far from breaking the ice. Bodies, emotions and memories, outside the traditional patterns of attraction and repulsion, are now on an equal footing on the threshold of this winter temple-turned-stage.Read More »
Young-hwa Seo
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Woo-jin Jang – Gyeo-wul-ba-me AKA Winter’s Night (2018)
2011-2020DramaSouth KoreaWoo-jin Jang -
Sang-soo Hong – Ja-yu-eui eon-deok AKA Hill of Freedom (2014)
2011-2020ArthouseDramaSang-soo HongSouth KoreaKwon (Seo Young-hwa) returns to Seoul from a restorative stay in the mountains. She is given a packet of letters left by Mori (Ryo Kase), who has come back from Japan to propose to her. As she walks down a flight of stairs, Kwon drops and scatters the letters, all of which are undated. When she reads them, she has to make sense of the chronology… and so must we. Alternately funny and haunting, Hill of Freedom is a series of disordered scenes based on the letters, echoing the cultural dislocation felt by Mori as he tries to make himself understood in halting English. At what point did he drink himself into a lonely stupor? Did he sleep with the waitress from the “Hill of Freedom” café (Moon So-ri) before or after he despaired of seeing Kwon again?Read More »