The Soju Sessions: A Hong Sang-soo Primer ========================================= Canonical URL: https://unratedfilmmakers.com/playlist/the-soju-sessions-hong-sang-soo-primer Source: UnratedFilmmakers Type: Director Study Summary ------- Hong Sang-soo writes his scenes on the morning of the shoot. His actors sometimes perform drunk — because the scenes require it, and because the soju is real. His films almost never exceed 80 minutes, cost around $100,000, and are shot on digital with a crew of a handful. He has made over thirty of them. The familiar complaints are part of the myth: that he makes the same film over and over, that his characters are insufferable, that his zoom shots are jarring. But repetition is the point. Hong's cinema is about the failure of self-awareness — the gap between how we narrate our lives and how we actually behave. Every film is a new variation on that theme, a new permutation of the same elements, like a jazz musician returning to the same changes. Critics reach for Eric Rohmer and Yasujirō Ozu. Hong himself lists Jean Vigo, Robert Bresson, and Ozu among his favorites. He is none of them — and, at this point, he is only himself. Films in this playlist ---------------------- 1. The Power of Kangwon Province — Hong Sang-soo · 1998 Runtime: 109 min Tag: Dual Heartache Synopsis: Two strangers unknowingly share the same grief — an affair's aftermath — on separate trips to the same mountain province. Curator note: Hong's second film and first masterpiece: the template for everything that follows. Told in two halves that barely overlap, it establishes the structure-as-theme that defines his work. Start here if you want to understand the grammar before the later films exploit it. This is one of the strongest entry points into Hong’s cinema because it shows how structure itself can become emotional meaning. The film does not move through a conventional plot; it moves through echoes, absences, and parallel experiences. 2. Tale of Cinema — Hong Sang-soo · 2005 Runtime: 89 min Tag: Film-Within-Film Synopsis: A movie-within-a-movie where a man in the audience recognizes the lead actress from his own past. Curator note: The film where Hong first fully deploys his signature zoom and introduces the meta-cinematic obsessions that never leave him. Loose, funny, and increasingly devastating — the ideal second film after Kangwon Province. This film belongs because it brings Hong’s cinema closer to self-reflection. The idea of cinema affecting real life — and real life becoming infected by cinema — becomes central here. 3. Right Now, Wrong Then — Hong Sang-soo · 2015 Runtime: 121 min Tag: Two Versions Synopsis: A film director meets a painter in Suwon. They drink, they reveal too much, they part badly. Then the day resets and they meet again — but this time, something clicks. Curator note: Not Groundhog Day logic; Hong offers no explanation, only a better version of two people. The most direct demonstration of his core thesis: honesty, not circumstance, changes everything. This may be the clearest expression of Hong’s entire method. The same situation becomes a different film because the behavior changes slightly. Tiny shifts in honesty, timing, attention, and ego completely transform the meaning of the encounter. 4. On the Beach at Night Alone — Hong Sang-soo · 2017 Runtime: 101 min Tag: Autobiographical Drift Synopsis: Kim Min-hee plays an actress hiding in Hamburg and then Gangneung after the public revelation of her affair with a married filmmaker. Curator note: Which is, of course, what was actually happening. The most autobiographically raw of Hong's films, and among his most emotionally direct: grief, limbo, and the strange lightness of a life lived outside convention. This film makes Hong’s personal and artistic world almost impossible to separate. But it is not valuable only because of autobiography. It matters because it turns scandal, loneliness, and emotional exile into something quiet, unresolved, and strangely graceful. 5. The Woman Who Ran — Hong Sang-soo · 2020 Runtime: 77 min Tag: Quiet Encounters Synopsis: Gamhee visits three friends while her husband is away on business. Curator note: Each visit is a long, unbroken conversation — the camera barely moves. One of the quietest films Hong has made and one of the best: a study in the texture of female friendship, the weight of compromised choices, and what it means to stay or go. This is one of Hong’s most refined late films. It shows how a film can be built almost entirely from visits, pauses, conversations, and small interruptions. Nothing dramatic seems to happen, yet the film slowly reveals questions about freedom, marriage, routine, and escape. 6. The Novelist's Film — Hong Sang-soo · 2022 Runtime: 92 min Tag: Making Art Synopsis: A blocked novelist wanders through Seoul, encountering old friends and acquaintances, until she persuades a retired actress to appear in a short film she'll improvise with a borrowed camera. Curator note: The film ends by showing us the short film. Shot in black and white by Hong himself — he also edited, scored, and produced — this is his most purely joyful statement about the redemptive act of making art. This feels like Hong speaking directly about the act of making something small, personal, and alive. It is not just a story about a novelist or a film shoot. It is a quiet argument for continuing to create, even when the work is modest, improvised, and fragile. 7. The Day a Pig Fell into the Well — Hong Sang-soo · 1996 Runtime: 117 min Tag: Debut Feature Synopsis: Hong's debut is an ensemble portrait of Seoul strivers — a writer, his married lover, her husband, and a ticket girl — whose lives intersect around an affair and its slow catastrophe. Curator note: Rawer and more conventional than what follows, but the cruelty and the dark humor are already fully formed. Essential for understanding how deliberate the later minimalism is. This shows what Hong’s cinema looked like before it became fully reduced to its later form. The film is rougher and more narrative-driven, but the emotional cruelty, sexual embarrassment, and moral blindness are already present. 8. Hahaha — Hong Sang-soo · 2010 Runtime: 116 min Tag: Memory Comedy Synopsis: Two male friends meet over drinks in Seoul and recall their separate summer trips to Tongyeong — where, unknown to each other, they'd overlapped in embarrassing and illuminating ways. Curator note: The flashback structure is pure Hong: the story's meaning lives entirely in the gap between memory and fact. His funniest film; the soju flows freely, and so does the self-deception. This turns memory into comedy. The characters think they are telling stories about the past, but what they really reveal is how badly they understand themselves. It is one of Hong’s funniest and most generous films, while still being quietly merciless. 9. Claire's Camera — Hong Sang-soo · 2017 Runtime: 68 min Tag: Cannes Sketch Synopsis: Shot on the fly during the Cannes Film Festival itself, this fleet 69-minute comedy stars Isabelle Huppert as a French teacher who photographs strangers with her polaroid and insists it changes people. Curator note: Light on plot, rich in feeling — and the best demonstration of what Hong can do with a handful of actors, a borrowed location, and no script whatsoever. This is almost a manifesto for limitation. A few actors, a festival location, a camera, and a loose idea become enough. It shows the freedom of Hong’s method: cinema as something that can happen quickly, lightly, and still leave an emotional trace. 10. A Traveler's Needs — Hong Sang-soo · 2024 Runtime: 90 min Tag: Language Lessons Synopsis: Isabelle Huppert returns as Iris, a Frenchwoman giving French lessons in Seoul — her method is to have students sing or describe their happiest memory, then draw language from the emotion. Curator note: One of Hong's most tender and cryptic late works. His second film in color after years of black and white, it feels like an exhale. This is a strong late-period addition because it continues Hong’s interest in language, performance, foreignness, and the strange ways people try to connect. It also shows that his cinema is still changing within its own narrow frame — softer, lighter, but still mysterious. More curated cinema discovery: https://www.unratedfilmmakers.com/