Tales of Cinema: Hong Sangsoo

February 3–18, 2023

 “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.

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  • The Day He Arrives

  • In Front of Your Face

  • The Day After

  • Oki’s Movie

  • Right Now, Wrong Then

  • Tale of Cinema

  • The Power of Kangwon Province

  • Upcoming
    Films
  • Upcoming
    Events
  • Selected
    Objects
  • Past
    Films
  • Past
    Events

Past Films

  • In Front of Your Face

    • Saturday, February 18 7:30 PM
    Hong Sangsoo
    South Korea, 2021

    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).

  • The Power of Kangwon Province

    • Saturday, February 11 5 PM
    Hong Sangsoo
    South Korea, 1998

    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).  

  • Right Now, Wrong Then 

    • Saturday, February 11 7:30 PM
    Hong Sangsoo
    South Korea, 2015

    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.

  • The Day He Arrives 

    • Saturday, February 4 5 PM
    Hong Sangsoo
    South Korea, 2011

    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).

    Introduced by Dennis Lim

  • The Day After

    • Saturday, February 4 7:30 PM
    Hong Sangsoo
    South Korea, 2017

    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).

    Introduced by Dennis Lim

  • Oki’s Movie

    • Friday, February 3 6:30 PM
    Hong Sangsoo
    South Korea, 2010

    A 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).

    Introduced by Dennis Lim

  • Tale of Cinema

    • Friday, February 3 8:30 PM
    Hong Sangsoo
    South Korea, 2005

    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).

    Introduced by Dennis Lim