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Director

Hong Sang-soo

South Korea

Hong Sang-soo (Korean: 홍상수; born 25 October 1960) is a South Korean film director and screenwriter. He is one of the most prominent exponents of slow cinema, often dealing in love affairs and everyday dilemmas in contemporary South Korea. His work has been widely-acclaimed and received numerous international accolades.

Thematic context drawn from Senses of Cinema. Read the full critical essay →

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. 1 Therefore, there is a need for some to resort to analogies: Hong is the Korean Eric Rohmer, 2 or the…

You look at those films and realize that a story can be a lot simpler, and it's just the accumulation of interactions. That was a huge shift in how I thought about what it means to tell a story and what a movie can be.

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