Night and Day

Colour, 35 mm
South Korea, 2008, 145 min
Section: Horizons

Synopsis

While the film deals with a Korean painter who has escaped to Paris on the run from the law, director Hong Sang-soo gives audiences nothing of what the premise might suggest. His image of the legendary metropolis is limited to the standard alleyways and deliberately neglects the appeal of the city’s salient features. Likewise, the story of the main hero itself includes neither the existential discourse of harrowed artists nor extreme situations. As is typical of the world-renowned South Korean filmmaker, he concentrates the camera’s perspective on the everyday, meaningless episodes of his characters’ lives in scenes built around minimalism. The strictly constructed, almost mathematically precise system of narration, characteristic of the director’s previous films, is substituted here with the seemingly looser structure of diary entries. In spite of all the formal changes, also evident in the shooting technique, the director remains faithful to his focus on reflecting frustration and lust in partnerships of the modern adult generation.

About the director

Hong Sang-soo (b. 1960, Seoul) joined the group of Asian filmmakers regularly featured at international festivals with his outstanding debut The Day a Pig Fell into the Well (Daijiga umule pajinnal, 1996). Hong’s films are characterised by a minimalistic style and particularly by a specific narrative structure, where seemingly everyday events are repeated or swapped around. Contrasting two events that are essentially identical but, at the same time, differ in fundamental ways, gives the audience the leeway for their own reflection on the characters and their fortunes. Visitors to KVIFF have had the opportunity to see the variability and expediency of this method for themselves in the films The Power of Kangwon Province (Kangwondo eui him, 1998) and Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (Oh! Soo-jung, 2000) presented at the KVIFF in 2000. He also made Tale of Cinema (Geuk jang jeon, 2005).