Dir. Hong Sangsoo
2022, South Korea, 92 min
Korean with English subtitles
Join us for our new series, Staff Picks, where our Cinematheque staff will select and introduce new and old favourites. This month’s selection was chosen by projectionist Jonathan Lee-Wing.
Junhee (Lee Hyeyoung, last seen in Hong’s In Front of Your Face) is a novelist who’s grown disenchanted with her own writing. On a trip to see an old friend, she runs into a film director who was set to adapt one of her novels before the project fell through. One chance encounter leads to another and soon she finds herself having lunch with Kilsoo (Kim Minhee), a well-known actress also questioning her role as an artist. It’s then that Junhee has an epiphany: she will make a film starring Kilsoo. It won’t be like other films. It will be the novelist’s film.
Tense, absorbing and finally enchanting…
– Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times
The Novelist’s Film is straightforwardly chronological and naturalistic, but that makes it no less intricate or sophisticated a reflection on the nature of movies, both intellectual and practical.
– Richard Brody, The New Yorker