TSPDT

Key Production Countries: South Korea, France
Key Genres: Drama, Psychological Drama, Romantic Drama, Comedy, Comedy Drama, Comedy of Manners, Romantic Comedy, Family & Personal Relationships
Key Collaborators: Hahm Sung-Won (Editor), Jeong Yong-jin (Composer), Kim Min-hee (Leading Actress), Park Hong-yeol (Cinematographer), Kim Kyoung-hee (Producer), Kim Hyung Koo (Cinematographer), Kwon Hae-hyo (Leading Character Actor), Gi Ju-bong (Leading Character Actor), Yoo Joon-sang (Leading Character Actor), Young-hwa Seo (Leading Character Actress), Seon-mi Song (Leading Character Actress), Kim Eui-sung (Leading Character Actor)

"Mr. Hong’s stories return to certain touchstones. A writer, a filmmaker, a student or some combination of these become romantically entangled. Drunken confessions and professional pratfalls invariably take place. Narratives are often retold from different perspectives, or ambiguously, as if they might be fantasies." - Nicolas Rapold (The New York Times, 2017)

"There are few filmmakers as distinctive as the South Korean master Hong Sang-soo, a writer-director whose films are immediately recognisable to even those with very little investment in auteurism. At the same time, he is not easy to pin down and describe, as his style is subtle and thus often elusive for the critic, a fact compounded by Hong’s reticence to discuss the meaning of his work. Therefore, there is a need for some to resort to analogies: Hong is the Korean Eric Rohmer, or the Korean Woody Allen, comparisons that are by no means outrageous and yet seriously inadequate, especially with regards to Hong’s style… Ultimately Hong Sang-soo is a filmmaker operating very much, for better and for worse, within his own cinematic world, one that can be linked to both national and international contexts but which also exists and continues to evolve in its own unique form." - Marc Raymond (Senses of Cinema, 2016)

"The films of South Korean director Hong Sang-soo are at once deceptively simple and dense with subtle shades of meaning. Hong is often compared to legendary French filmmakers Éric Rohmer—for his extended dialogue scenes and his acute moral vision—and Alain Resnais—for his abiding fascination with the function (or malfunction) of memory and the structure of storytelling. Yet his films are firmly grounded in the social and sexual politics, and drinking rituals, of his native South Korea. Each new Hong movie stands on its own virtues, while also seeming like a new episode in a vast overarching serial narrative, a grand super-story about ceaseless self-sabotage, blinkered yearning, male vanity, the resolute failure to learn from mistakes, and the moments of tenderness and beauty which could almost, maybe redeem the whole human comedy." - Museum of the Moving Image, 2016

"Of all the South Korean filmmakers to emerge over the past fifteen years, Hong Sangsoo is the closest to what Americans think of as an independent filmmaker. Born in Seoul in 1960, Hong studied filmmaking at Chungang University and subsequently earned degrees from both California College of the Arts and the Art Institute of Chicago before returning to South Korea to teach screenwriting while launching his filmmaking career. Since his first film, The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well, his work has attracted acclaim both in South Korea and internationally. He has averaged almost a film a year since, a prolific pace that recalls the work of the filmmakers of the French New Wave, who developed a visual and a narrative style that would allow them to work quickly and inexpensively, as independents." - Harvard Film Archive, 2011

"The prolific South Korean director Hong Sang-soo is often accused of making the same movie over and over again — a criticism that can lose sight of the fact that repetition, in filmmaking and everyday reality, has become one of his signature themes." - Justin Chang (Los Angeles Times, 2016)

"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)." - Tom Vick (Allmovie)

"It is a critical truism—and only partially true—that the Korean filmmaker Hong Sangsoo makes the same movie over and over. His protagonists belong to a particular milieu, which happens to be his: they work in the arts, usually in film, sometimes as novelists or painters. They are maladroit, at times in professional settings, always in personal matters. His plots revolve around romantic anguish and complication. Failures of communication abound. Characters are driven by libidinal urges and petty vanity. Action tends to be displaced to the realm of talk. Awkward conversations unfold over many drinks, alcohol serving as disinhibitor and spur to philosophical rumination. No one ever learns from their mistakes. But to accuse Hong of repeating himself misses the point. Repetition in his films is both subject and structuring device, and, like any artist who works with this formal strategy, Hong finds meaning in the subtlest variations, coaxing compelling moral dramas from prosaic scenarios." - Dennis Lim (The New Yorker, 2022)