The Day She Returns (그녀가 돌아온 날, Hong Sang-soo, 2026)

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Perhaps it’s not that uncommon for an actress to give vaguely similar answers to near identical questions during a series of press interviews, but the interplay between scripted and unscripted dialogue along with the awkwardness and forced politeness of a conversation that straddles the borders of personal and professional begins to reveal the lines between what we say and what we mean in Hong Sang-soo’s latest The Day She Returns (그녀가 돌아온 날, Geunyeoga doraon nal).

Jeong-su (Song Seon-mi) is returning to the industry after a 12-year career break following her marriage and subsequent divorce. Even so, the reason Jeongsu gives for not having continued to work is that she simply wasn’t offered anything, which partially explains why she’s made her comeback in an independent film by an up-and-coming director. Each of her interviewers is a young female journalist, which contributes to the sense that in someways she is actually talking to a reflection of herself. It’s not really until the final interview that they actually start talking about the film with most fixating on the reasoning behind Jeong-su’s absence from the screen along with her personal life and divorce.

Though Jeongsu later focuses on a desire to see things clearly as they are, it seems that she is not being entirely honest or is perhaps failing to see the truth about herself rather than deliberately misleading the interviewers. Though she tries to put them at ease, perhaps Jeong-su herself is a little more nervous than she makes out. She asks each of the women if they’d like to try to draft beer at this German restaurant she seems fond of, with the first replying she prefers not to drink on the job. Jeongsu says she doesn’t want one either and no longer drinks as much as she did, telling the second interviewer she’s on a diet, but later revealing she may have gone through a period of drinking too much after her divorce. She clearly wants a drink herself, but feels awkward to order one if the other person doesn’t want to join her, making excuses to be polite. Similarly, during breaks between interviews, she mainly sits outside vaping as if to blow off stress. She later calls one of the interviewers to ask her not to include a couple of things she said about her divorce on the grounds that it might not be fair to her former husband.

Each of the interviewers asks her if she has any advice for the younger generation and each time she offers them similar platitudes about learning to love themselves but that true love sometimes means doing things you don’t particularly want to do. This is perhaps advice she might have wanted to give to herself, but at the same time does not appear to have much confidence in. She tells the second two interviewers how happy she is with her simple family life living with her daughter and their dog, but at times it feels as if she’s talking about someone else, or perhaps it become more obvious that even in this situation is still playing a role as an actress being interviewed. This is too is “performance”.

Indeed, she later tries to “recreate” these experiences as part of an acting class. Hong reverts to a lower-quality camera, blurring the image as if to reflect the “unreality” of this “real” situation as Jeongsu repeats a script she’s written amalgamating all these experiences. The recreation proceeds as it did before, but as it drifts towards the more personal elements both Jeongsu and the interviewer begin to need to check their scripts. Jeongsu cannot quite key into her personal “reality” during this kind of “performance” and no longer knows quite what to say. The awkwardness that develops between herself and the actor playing the interviewer seems different than that created by distance between herself and the journalists which is born of the need for forced politeness. “All may be an illusion,” she admits, leaving the possibility that there may not really be any such thing as clarity or absolute truth even as she tries to search for them in both her personal and professional lives. There may not really be as much of a border between “performance” and “authenticity” in the way we usually see them, only a constant interplay between the two as we seek to be understood rather than to understand.

The Day She Returns screened as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Ideal and Weird Family (이상 가족, Kim Ji-hyun, 2026)

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A family on the verge of implosion begins to repair some of its wounds while taking an impromptu road trip after receiving a sudden invitation to the wedding of an increasingly distant aunt in Kim Ji-hyun’s warmhearted dramedy, Ideal and Weird Family (이상 가족, Isang Kajok). Kim deliberately plays with our own biases and expectations by beginning with the parents separated before confirming that He-soo and Da-sun are a same-sex couple whose relationship has degraded to breaking point largely due to the pressures involved with living in such a conservative and conformist society.

Indeed, Korea does not currently legally recognise same-sex marriage, yet Hee-soo and Da-sun refer to themselves as a married couple who are planning to “divorce”. Da-sun, a writer, seems to want to move out of their family home in order to be “free”, which appears as something closer to a midlife crisis and rejection of domestic responsibility than something fundamentally wrong with her relationship with Hee-soo and their two teenage daughters. Yet it’s later revealed that the cracks in the family’s foundations are partially caused by a differing approach to living an authentic life as a gay person in South Korea. Da-sun is already out and has a public profile as an award-winning writer, yet it’s Hee-soo who supports the family with her corporate job. As someone who works in a creative filed and doesn’t need to pay attention to office politics, perhaps it’s easier for Da-sun to be out while Hee-soo fears that being open about her private life will cause problems at work and impede her ability to provide for the family.

Hee-soo also fears that Da-sun’s openness will cause problems for their daughters, and it turns out that she’s at least partially right. Won was training to be a K-pop star and was apparently quite successful, but was kicked out of her agency when they find out that she has two mums. Won herself has posted whistleblowing videos about this on the interest, blasting the agency for its conservative views and defending her family even while threatened. She’s been trying to build a career as an influencer while posting her whistleblowing videos, but her viewers don’t seem to trust her and constantly ask for hard evidence to back up her claims. Sol, meanwhile, is more serious like Hae-soo but also wants to leave the family by going to boarding school and studying up on how to become financially independent. From what she later says, this may partly because she’s too sensitive and finds it difficult to accept the emotions of those around her knowing that they aren’t something she feels she can control.

They are all, in a way, experiencing their issues in isolation, unable to confide in each other while also yearning for their more ideal family. Da-sun’s family had rejected her because of her sexuality with her late father even threatening to have her struck off their family register. Her mother seems to be more accepting, though still struggling, but at the same time immediately identifies Hee-soo as the “wife” and sympathises with her, correctly guessing that Da-sun probably dumps all the domestic stuff on Hee-soo and takes her labour for granted. Da-sun says she wants to be her true self, but Hee-soo asks who gets to do that when raising children. “I didn’t get my divorce, you should at least get yours,” Da-sun’s mother advises recalling the similarities with her own marriage.

But if a visit to Da-sun’s traditional rural home answers a lot of questions, so does Hee-soo’s arrival at her younger sister’s wedding to a man she disapproved of. Ji-soo only invited her a couple of days before, apparently because her mother-in-law wanted to do a ceremony with Ji-soo’s family and both their parents have passed away. The snooty in-laws have, however, already hired a lot of paid guests to masquerade as Ji-soo’s family, even going so far as to bar Da-sun and the children from the ceremony. Suddenly, Hee-soo’s keep quiet attitude begins to crumble when faced with this apparent betrayal by her sister, realising that perhaps it was wrong to ask people to tell such a “big lie” by not mentioning that she lives with another woman.

Through each of these experiences and confrontations, the family members begin to work through some of their issues while rediscovering a sense of togetherness they may have lost amid the complications of modern life. They may all need to give something up in order to stay together, but may find that they gain more than they lose in the pursuit of their “ideal family,” something they may otherwise have lost sight of amid the pressures of living in such a conservative society.

Ideal and Weird Family screened as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Baby Jackfruit Baby Guava (Em bé đồng bóng, em bé ngạo nghễ và em bé đau lòng, Nông Nhật Quang, 2026)

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In his feature debut documentary Baby Jackfruit Baby Guava, Nông Nhật Quang charts his attempts to connect with his family having left his hometown for Hanoi to live a freer life as a gay man. His sister’s unexpected pregnancy later brings him back while looking for a better kind of balance between the personal and the familial, but also confronts him with his own choices and insensitivity when reacting to his older sister’s mental health diagnosis.

Mai is nine years older, and though the siblings were closer in their childhood, Quang came to feel a distance growing between them as Mai’s behaviour became increasingly erratic. Though he advised his parents to have her see a doctor, it wasn’t until sometime later that Mai was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Though his more conservative mother had lamented that neither of them were likely to give her grandchildren, Mai has become pregnant but the prospect also has the family worried as how to Mai will cope. For the time being, she is continuing to take her medication, leading Cuc to worry about potential effects on the baby, while coming off the meds to breastfeed has her worried about Mai. Once the baby is born, Mai sometimes describes disturbing visions of hurting her son and requires a lot of family support.

But at the same time, she says that she pours all the love her mother never gave her into her son. She complains that Cuc only cares for her while she’s ill and otheriwise seems to prefer her brother or husband. Cut is indeed supportive, but also complains of being tired while also torn between the needs of both her children. When she attends a screening of one of Quang’s films, she finds it difficult to concentrate because her phone’s blowing up with notifications that Mai has insulted the entire family of a neighbour on Facebook. The neighbour later calls her to complain, yelling at Cuc that they should “put the crazy in the hospital” and stop making trouble for other people. Quang regrets not having been there when she needed him, having gone to Hanoi in part to get away from the turmoil at the house. He does not shy away from his negative emotions in including excerpts from old diaries in which he expresses his frustration, calling Mai a “burden” he does not really want to bear.

Cuc calls their family “ill-fated”, struggling to accept her son’s sexuality and her daughter’s mental health condition. Though the family know that Quang is gay, he feels under pressure to tone himself down even while referring to himself as the “Flamboyant Baby.” When his mother comes to stay with him in the city, Quang has to spend time getting rid of all his gay stuff to avoid offending her, while he’s also avoided telling them that he has a serious boyfriend. When Quang tries to introduce him, Cuc reacts badly, complaining he’s too old and too foreign. Yet simultaneously, she seems hurt he hadn’t told her before. “You take everything too personally,” she tells him when he suggests that she holds him to a different standard from his sister or her husband.

Yet through all this bickering and resentment, the family does begin to come closer while bonding over Baby Guava. Nông Nhật Quang is remarkably even-handed and empathetic in his direction, even if his third-person voiceover is tinged with a note of melancholy that he still can’t seem to find a way to completely connect with his family members in the way he would like. Even once he has introduced his partner to the family, there is a still a divide between his life in Hanoi and that in his hometown. Even so, they seem to have reached a happy equilibrium brokered by a process of mutual understanding and unspoken solidarity as they look forward to watching Baby Guava grow into whoever they’re going to be as the latest addition to their growing family.

Baby Jackfruit Baby Guava as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Sisa (Jun Robles Lana, 2025)

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The woman who will come to be known as Sisa (Hilda Koronel) enters the frame like a wandering spirit, a ghost of a ruined land come to haunt those who would now attempt to “rebuild” it. She looks at the young soldier atop a guard tower with witchlike intensity, cursing him with her eyes though smiling beatifically before urinating on the ground. This land that you have scorched, I shall water, she seems to say, even as her actions are intended to make her seem “mad” and in that way essentially harmless, or at least harmful only to herself.

Set in 1902, Jun Robles Lana’s steely drama explores the traumatic legacy of colonialism through the experiences of a collection of women living a concentration camp during the Philippine–American War. America had annexed the Philippines after the Spanish American War, denying the nation’s attempt to assert its own independence after the collapse of the Spanish Empire. According to the title cards opening the film, America pursued a scorched earth policy when faced with resistance resulting in the genocide of thousands of Filipinos. The community of women at the film’s centre who have been forced into a concentration camp have each lost husbands and children as a result of the war and are then both dependent on and brutalised by the American military.

In fact the camp’s commander, Harrison (Kuya Manzano), describes Sisa as “another lunatic thanks to this war.” Her “madness” is understandable, yet her “inability” to remember her name is also an expression of the ways in which her culture has been taken from her. Harrison assumes her to be an insensible fool, though it seems that Sisa is able to understand his incredibly ham-fisted attempts at speaking Spanish along with his English, yet makes no reply because for now silence is her weapon. It is useful for her to appear “mad” as it gives her an excuse to go wandering and no one much expects that she could secretly be plotting against them.

On the other hand, this “madness” is also a rejection of the forced assimilation the Americans seem to be intent on. When none of the women respond to Harrison’s Spanish, he complains that if no one can speak it after 300 years of colonisation, what hope does English have. He does not appear to consider that perhaps they just don’t want to talk to him. In any case, the Americans have made it compulsory for the children to learn English with 13-year-old Nena (Angellie Sanoy) a perfect model of what they hope to achieve. Proud of her accomplishments and enamoured with this new culture, she comes to sympathise with the Americans while the older women remain wary and much more aware of the wilful erase of their culture. Mrs Warren (Isabel Lamers) speaks condescendingly of their lack of the “civilisation” which she is bestowing on them as a gift. She encourages Nena to use cutlery, which, her mother points out, is a rather moot point when all you ever get to eat is baked sweet potato.

Mrs Warren rather insensitively organises a ball to cheer everyone up, forcing the women to wear American-style ballgowns she actually picked up cheap from a disbanded theatre troupe. Just like Sisa’s madness, these are costumes they are forced to wear to survive, but the women are all but ignored at the party and completely bored by this offensive celebration of the legitimisation of their enslavement. Most of them leave early with only Leonor (Jennica Garcia), who has become Harrison’s mistress, staying behind. Leonor has convinced herself that Harrison is actually a “good man who cares about out country” hamstrung by the wider politics of the situation. This is perhaps also a costume she wears to survive, enjoying the perks of being close to Harrison such as receiving fresh bread from Manila while believing that the other soldiers see her as his “wife”. But at the same time, Harrison forces her to turn on her fellow countrymen, publicly slapping a woman who had criticised her as a traitor and a whore.

This theme of sexual exploitation and humiliation is later extended to the nation as a whole which is left with little option but to accept its subjugation. Sisa looks on in silence in rage along with buried maternal compassion such as her sympathy for Nena who has become pregnant by a young American soldier she believes loves her. Like many of the other women, Sisa has nothing left to lose. Her family, name, and identity have all already been taken from her, and in the end she too will have no option but to turn on her fellow countrymen in order to exact her revenge. “Our grief is endless,” she tells one of the other women, bearing out the weight of all she’s lost which only “madness” can assuage.

Sisa screened as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Now I Met Her (我的妈耶, Xiao Luxi, 2026)

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Another in the recent trend of filiality-themed dramas such as Hi, Mom and Give Me Five, Xiao Luxi’s heartwarming comedy Now I Met Her (我的妈耶, wǒ de mā ye) is essentially a coming of age tale in which the hero confronts the lingering trauma of his mother’s death in childbirth after being presented with her diary on his 18th birthday. Paradoxically, it also taps into a sense of nostalgia among those of the parents’ generation for the bygone days of China from the 1980s to early 2000s, yet without engaging in any sort of critique or mention of the wider social issues besides youthful poverty and the rise of cross-border smuggling in the late 90s.

Though Eleven Zhang’s (Huang Minghao) doting father Xue (Bai Ke) still talks to his late mother Dongyu’s (Ma Sichun) portrait on the altar, Eleven often says things to the effect of not having a mother at all seeing as he never knew her. In some ways, he’s been reminded of her every day, though these are sometimes negative associations such as his curly hair for which he was made fun of as a child. Meanwhile, as a teenage boy, Eleven is also a little resentful of his father and wants to separate himself further from the familial domestic environment and achieve greater independence. Xue, too, seems to think this might be the time for change, irritated that Eleven doesn’t really want to have a birthday dinner with him, but equally suggesting that maybe they should try somewhere new rather than going to McDonald’s as usual, acknowledging that Eleven has probably outgrown this tradition.

More or less forced to read his mother’s diaries which are pressed on him by some sort of spiritual power, Eleven finally has to acknowledge that he did have mother who lived a whole life before he was born, though what’s actually written is a chronicle of three periods of romance. In the first, she’s Eleven’s age, and develops a crush on a classmate who dreams of dancing glory. Because hers is a selfless love, she helps him win a dance competition knowing that if he does he’ll get the opportunity to study in Shenzhen and leave her behind. Next, she’s a university student in Guangzhou who embarks on a serous relationship with a waiter who saves her from a creep in a karaoke bar, but the pair have no money and the guy eventually turns to desperate measures in order to try and provide a more comfortable life for her. Later she marries Xue after connecting with him at her office job and returns to her hometown after her mother has a stroke to open a restaurant.

Xue’s special gift to his son is the last of the diaries which detail the time between Dongyu’s early pregnancy and her death, keying Eleven in to the sacrifice his mother willing made for him which allows him to overcome his feelings of abandonment in knowing that he was loved and wanted. Nevertheless, the vision of his mother in the diaries is perhaps somewhat idealised and partially of his own creation. What she eventually becomes is a figure of maternal sacrifice. Nevertheless, the diaries also allow Eleven to reacher a greater understanding of his father that would otherwise perhaps take a little longer to arrive, learning to appreciate the love and devotion Xue had for his late wife and their family while raising his with the help of his own mother.

It seems in a way that Dongyu may have her own issues with abandonment in her memories of her father, apparently ending up marrying a man much like him but one who was at least able to turn his life around and devote himself to his family. Though it might actually be Eleven’s vision rather than Dongyu’s, there is something quite poignant in seeing her live out the rest of her life in her last eleven minutes while encouraging a future Eleven to live to the fullest and be happy rather than dwelling on the past. In any case, in getting to “meet” his mother through her diaries, he realises that his parents had whole lives, or maybe several of them, that he never knew about, but equally that he did coexist with each of them no matter how briefly while his father is still here with him in the present day. Painting a warm and fuzzy vision of China in the late 20th and early 21st century, Xiao’s cineliterate first feature is a loving tribute to maternal devotion and the enduring nature of familial bonds.

Now I Met Her screened as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Be My Baby (미아, Yoo Jong-seok, 2025)

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What actually is “an identity” and what does it mean to possess one? In Yoo Jong-seok’s psychological thriller Be My Baby (미아, Mia), an external “identity” largely seems to be defined by the possession of a document. In an odd kind of way, the film seems to imply at times that one woman is interchangeable with another. No one checks these IDs more than superficially. ID photos don’t often give much of an impression of height or build, and long dark hair seems to be enough of a defining characteristic to merit a pass. Possession of the ID equals the possession of that identity even if it is only borrowed or lent for a specific purpose.

In fact, we can’t really be sure that anyone is who they say they are. When we first meet Seo-rim, she lies. She’s taken a photo of an ultrasound seemingly swiped from the hospital where she works as a nurse to guilt her boyfriend’s other woman into breaking up with him, but Eun-bi isn’t having any of it. Seo-rim has miscalculated on one level as she assumed that she and Eun-bi were social equals, while it turns out that Eun-bi is from a wealthy family and essentially works in the bar just for fun. Seo-rim’s boyfriend is leaving her for Eun-bi in part because he wants to live a rich person’s life and has no way of earning it for himself.

In that way it becomes clear that Seo-rim and Eun-bi live in different worlds, though Seo-rim decides to try her identity on for size in order to enact a plan of revenge that involves faking her own death so she can claim on an insurance policy that lists her mysteriously absent twin sister as the beneficiary. To do this sets her sights on a young woman she finds knocked out in the street and takes to the hospital mostly on the grounds that she does not appear to have connections to other people and therefore will not be easily missed. “No one notices when a homeless girl dies,” Soo-mi says prophetically when talking about the death of the woman whose identity she temporarily borrowed. Ironically enough, Seo-rim does not seem to notice that she already has a connection with Soo-mi that makes her more than the perfect target, but perhaps also a dangerous liability.

The danger presented by those who lack a clear identity of their own is a staple of the genre, but there’s something unsettling about Soo-mi’s hollowness as if she were in search of a new home to inhabit. She asks if Soo-mi hasn’t also wanted to live a different life or be a different person, but clearly means it in a more literal sense than most. She eyes up Eun-bi’s swanky apartment as if planning to steal it from Seo-rim without realising it doesn’t belong to her either. For reasons that become apparent, Soo-mi is in search of a new identity as a means of burying an old one, so that she can live a “normal life,” rather than being in permanent hiding from an exploitative community. Seo-rim is, however, also pursued though in her case by loan sharks having accrued massive debts to pay for her sister’s medical treatment. Unable to continue paying into her “insurance policy”, Seo-rim has been embezzling from the hospital and is in any case only a contract worker rather than a regular employee. With hospital budgets shrinking, she almost certainly won’t be rehired. Given all that, it’s not really clear why Soo-mi would actively want her identity anyway aside from possessing document to tell her who she is.

In any case, we can’t be sure who Seo-rim really is, either, or how much of what happens around her is objective reality. Her friend at the hospital cautions her about using an experimental mental health medicine, while she appears to have visual hallucinations and acts in odd ways that do not always make sense. We may end up asking ourselves if Soo-mi is even “real”, or at least if she was really with Seo-rim when she began enacting her revised plan. Even if she was, perhaps she was also merely using Seo-rim so she could run away with a new identity and enough money to live a “normal life.” The only path to survival seems to be to steal from those weaker than oneself. Pushed into a corner by an indifferent society, weighed down by debts both financial and spiritual, all they can really do is fight over the discarded scraps of those like Eun-bi whose presence would very definitely be missed in a world which little cares for those without means and no currency to their names.

Be My Baby screened as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

Trailer (no subtitles0

En Route To (지우러 가는 길, Yoo Jae-in, 2025)

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“Give only what you can take responsibility for,” Yoon-ji (Sim Su-bin) is advised by an apparently compassionate older man trying to explain to her that sometimes you end up causing further pain while trying to be kind. Yoon-ji’s problem might be that no one seems to want to take responsibility when it comes to her and she herself is struggling to do so while faced with an unexpected pregnancy. Not only has the father disappeared off the face of the earth, but he was also her 36-year-old high teacher and is obviously not going to take any sort of responsibility for his conduct, certainly not for the baby, but not for the false expectations and unresolved emotions with which he’s left Yoon-ji, either.

Much of Yoo Jae-in’s graduation film En Route to (지우러 가는 길, Jiureo ganeun gil) takes place against the backdrop of the only recent decriminalisation of abortion in Korea, but explores the ways in which young women like Yoon-ji are still left with few options when deciding what to do about an unexpected pregnancy. Though she wanted to keep the baby, she is pressured into an abortion assuming that Mr Han has disappeared because she refused to get one and will return once she has. This rather childish thinking demonstrations both her naivety and her desperation, little understanding the situation she is in. It doesn’t seem to occur to her that Mr Han may have done this before and probably doesn’t see her as a long-term romantic prospect. After all, he has a wife already, even if they’ve been living separately with the implication that he’s ended up being transferred to this school in flight from allegations at his previous place of work.

To try to keep it secret, Yoon-ji orders abortion pills off the internet without any sort of guarantee of what she’s actually taking which could be actively harmful to her health in other ways or perhaps just be chalk that won’t help her to end the pregnancy. After finding out what Yoon-ji has done because she borrowed her savings to pay for the pills, Yoon-ji’s roommate Gyung-sun (Lee Jiwon) asks her why didn’t go to a hospital, but as they find out, Yoon-ji would need parental approval in addition to the money to pay for the procedure and as she was abandoned by her father, there is no one she can ask to sign even assuming that the situation allowed her to involve her guardians and she felt comfortable doing so. A friend knows of a vet who is willing to provide backstreet abortions as a hangover from the era in which it was a criminal offence to end a pregnancy, leaving Yoon-ji at the mercy of potentially dangerous medical interventions.

Meanwhile, she can’t really tell anyone about what’s happened to her as Mrs Han has begun to figure out that her husband may have been a serial offender but is intent on saving his reputation, perhaps as a means of saving her own so that she would not have to accept the fact not only that her husband had sexual relations outside of the marriage, but that he did so with underage girls whose trust in him he willingly betrayed while abusing his position as a teacher. She uses her relative wealth to cow Yoon-ji and Gyung-sun into silence by dangling the prospect of a scholarship, ironically in Mr Han’s name as a means of whitewashing his reputation.

Gyung-sun is particularly upset about this, partly because her own mother gave birth to her very young and Gyung-sun has always felt a little guilty about all her mother missed out on to raise her like going to university and getting a better job, or getting married and starting a bigger family. Without explaining why, she pushes Yoon-ji towards ending the pregnancy in part because she experienced bullying and exclusion simply for being the child of a young single mother and does not think it’s fair for Yoon-ji to have a child when she has not really thought about the realities of raising it by herself or what she will tell them about their father when they’re old enough to ask. Both Yoon-ji and Gyung-sun are somewhat outsiders, though Yoon-ji continues to yearn for a family of her own, while Gyung-sun has been selling under the table vape cartridges at school to fund a working holiday visa in Australia specifically to set out for her own independence.

Nevertheless, it’s really in each other that they begin to find a new sense of ”family” as they bond over the question of what to do for the best when it comes to Yoon-ji’s future and the baby’s. They  do indeed take responsibility for what they give to each other, and though left to handle all of this largely on their own, offer mutual support through this difficult time before allowing a conclusion to be reached that will enable them to move on. Warm and empathetic while refusing to moralise, Yoo’s humorous drama is a testament to the power of female friendship which can in some ways at least overcome the constraints of the world around it.

En Route To screened as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Home A Loan (고인아파트, Kim Tae-kyung, 2026)

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Is it the “black mould” that’s driving new homeowner Eun-jin (Yoo Seon) out of her mind, or the combination of unresolved trauma and the financial pressures of trying to secure a safe and comfortable living environment for your family in contemporary Seoul where out of control property prices have made ownership an unattainable dream for many? Echoing a motif that’s become increasingly familiar in recent Korean films, Eun-jin buys an apartment which looks out onto a complex of other, much nicer, luxury apartment blocks that are well out of her reach. Yet she’s convinced herself that the building she’s moved in to will soon be redeveloped and she could make a life-changing amount of money by flipping it once the renovations are completed.

The only snag would seem to be that the block is plastered in signs that say things like “redevelopment equals death”. In fact, Gong-in Apartments is well known locally as “Go-in Apartments” which sounds like “apartments of the departed”, making this place seem “haunted” in a less literal sense as something that exists out of time with the world around it. The local residents seem to regard the blocks as old-fashioned and an eyesore. They are slightly embarrassed by them, and prefer to avoid the people that live there. The block is then “haunted” in another sense in that most of the “inhabitants” are “ghost owners” who bought the apartments as an investment but do not live there, nor do they rent the apartments out due to the rundown nature of the building. Despite having pushed her to invest by implying that the city had virtually already agreed to go ahead with the redevelopment, Eun-jin’s estate agent is surprised that she actually intends to live there given the building’s reputation, yet later revelations suggest she may have sold this unit before. She has definitely sold others in the building to people who were financially ruined by their decision to buy and in some cases took their own lives.

Yet Eun-jin is proud of her new status as a homeowner, as if reaching a new level as a fully-fledged member of society. She cleans and redecorates it herself, peeling off the layers of lining on the ceiling and clearing away the mould assuming it’s only caused by the fact the apartment had been empty. Yet as a doctor later explains, you can’t get rid of that kind of mould by papering over it, just as Eun-jin cannot get over the familial trauma from her childhood by creating a superficially happy home of her own. In some ways, the film ultimately takes a turn for the conservative in its messaging as most of the problems are attributed to paternal absence, even if that absence was also caused by the economic conditions of the society which forced Ji-chul (Lee Jong-hyu) to live separately from his family in order to provide for them while Eun-jin works in a local factory to make ends meet.

In the opening stretches of the film, one almost wonders if Ji-chul is a ghost himself as Eun-jin only talks to him on the phone through which he offers words of kind support that might as well be Eun-jin talking to herself, while he is able to offer little in the way of practical help. Though his absence obviously increases the strain on Eun-jin as she has to care for the family alone while also working, the doctor frames it in more patriarchal tones as if things like this happen when women live without men. On one level he is blaming Ji-chul for failing as a man by leaving his family undefended, but also suggesting that women are incapable of protecting themselves. Eun-jin repeatedly states that she will “protect” her family, but ends up endangering them as her reality becomes ever more fragmented and confused. In the end only Ji-chul’s return can save the children from her mania, though he cannot cure her of her delusions alone.

It soon becomes apparent that Eun-jin has been experiencing reality differently to those around her, frequently seeing centipedes in the house while others seemingly don’t react to potentially life-threatening situations. At one point, she arrives at work wearing a very old-fashioned, purple wraparound dress and with a makeup and hair style that seems reminiscent of an earlier era, suggesting that she may have been possessed by something more than just fear and fury that her investment is not actually going to pay off and she won’t even be able to afford to continue living in this moribund building where the lifts don’t work and no one has noticed the little boy from upstairs has been living alone so long he’s turned feral. Homeownership seems to have turned Eun-jin into a selfish and suspicious person, instinctively fearing the homeless as if now afraid either to become one or that they will somehow steal her space. She stops her son playing with the other boy, complaining that people like that will become stuck to you if you let them get too close while making no attempt to help him. Perhaps this is also a reflection of her own childhood trauma as are the visions she begins to see of a malevolent presence out to destroy her family. “I just wanted to do better,” she says, but it seems this society doesn’t really want to let her even as it dangles a vision of future happiness that is destined to remain far out of reach.

Home A Loan screened as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Time of Cinema (극장의 시간들, Lee Jong-pil, Yoon Ga-eun, Jang Kun-jae, 2025)

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Made in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Cinecube cinema in Seoul, Time of Cinema (극장의 시간들, Geugjang-ui Sigandeul) is an anthology film featuring three segments and bookended with a sequence set in the venue as a young woman takes lessons from the projectionist while classic films such as Ozu’s Late Spring play in the background. As such, each of the films has a kind of meta commentary on the nature of film, the industry and buildings as well as the impact it can have on people’s lives even if they happen to fall asleep during the movie.

This kind of reflexivity is evident in the opening segment, Chimpanzee, which features its protagonists recreating the dance from Godard’s Bande à part. This segment also is set across two time periods and is revealed to be “a film” based on the recollections of the director’s youth in which he spent time watching movies with two close friends while in the military. This sense of loss for shared experiences of the past is something that echoes through the other sequences and in the last seems as if it could in some senses be returned through unexpected reunion. In any case, the director appears to reclaim them through imprinting his memories in the film as a means of reliving them. Its protagonists also have a kind of truth revealed to them that something they assumed to be merely a legend was perhaps true after all.

The second sequence, meanwhile, directed by Yoon Ga-eun plays with the nature of film itself as we’re show several scenes that turn out to be in progress shots from the filming of another movie in which a collection of little girls are asked to repeat the same scene in a frustrated attempt to make it seem more “natural.” At the end, they all sit down to watch the film they’ve made, but this is also a part of the “film”, while we have also already been watching them, leading us to ponder on these many levels of refection within the video footage. Well known for her films featuring children such as The House of Us, Yoon gets the most from her young cast while at the same time demonstrating how difficult it can be work with child actors even if what she mainly does is to leave them to their own devices, capturing their spontaneity and enthusiasm in the most natural way possible.

The third sequence meanwhile is more firmly rooted in Cinecube and explores the less glamorous side of filmmaking in taking a leaf out of Goodbye Dragon Inn’s book as the cleaning lady walks up and down the aisles collecting rubbish even if, as they mentioned in the first segment, this place is too fancy to sell popcorn. Though the cleaning lady rarely has time to watch any films, she ends up running into an old friend who’s just come in to use the bathroom and pressures her into seeing whatever’s playing which happens to be a special screening of a movie with a director Q&A. The old friend’s name also has the same pronunciation of the word for “film”, and though she and everyone else in the cinema falls asleep, her time spent there seems to return something precious that she had lost while she also reunites with her old friend.

In this way it paints cinema as an interactive experience and all the more so when visiting a cinema rather than watching passively, or inattentively, though a TV screen. By the same token, it shows the cinema staff working hard from the put upon box office lady trying to tell a desperate cinephile that he’s arrived too late to enter the auditorium and, in any case, has booked his ticket for the following day, to the cleaning lady and projectionist who meticulously keeps an eye on everything, both digital and analogue, to ensure that the film is being projected as intended. Cinemas are in that sense social spaces in which people share experiences with both strangers and friends while in some ways unaware of the relationship that’s arising between themselves and the screen and the images that may also be changing them in ways untold.

Time of Cinema screened as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Good Neighbors (兩相好, Li Hsing, 1962)

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Known as the godfather of Taiwanese cinema, Li Hsing started out as an aspiring actor before making a string of incredibly popular Taiwanese-language films despite the fact that he himself was from the Mainland and could not speak a single word of Taiwanese. Language barriers are very much at the centre of his 1962 comedy Good Neighbors (兩相好, liǎngxiāng hǎo), which, in its way, marks the beginning of Li’s transition into Mandarin-language cinema, later becoming a proponent of “Healthy Realism”, in its subtly propagandistic insistence that everyone is really just one big Chinese family.

The Chens are Mandarin-speakers who migrated from Mainland China in the wake of the Chinese Civil War and have just moved in next to the Ngs, who are Taiwanese and do not understand Mandarin very well. Mr Chen is a traditional medicine practitioner, while Mr Ng is a Western-style doctor. Mr Chen insists they’re not in conflict with each other because their patients are looking for different things from each of them and might even use both kinds of medicine at the same time or turn to one kind of doctor over another depending on their symptoms. That will prove to be not quite true as the Chens struggle to attract clientele after opening their business while Ng’s clinic is always busy, leading them to consider poaching their patients by temporarily offering free consultations.

This sense of division is seen in the fact that Ng speaks some Japanese and claims to have studied medicine in Japan which links him with the colonial past rather than what might amount to a different colonial present represented by the KMT government who favoured Mandarin and in fact suppressed Taiwanese Hokkien and the indigenous languages of the island. In a roundabout way, the film uses Ng’s status as a Western doctor as a means of criticising Westernisation while never suggesting that one kind of medicine is better than another. Chen is always seen in traditional Chinese dress and seems to represent the essence of Chinese culture that the Ngs may have lost but can recover through their eventual intermarriages with the Chen family.

The funny thing is that neither Mrs Ng nor Mrs Chen subscribe to their family’s respective medical philosophies with each declaring that they don’t trust their husbands and would rather turn to the other kind of medicine without letting them know. Chen and Ng, meanwhile, are actually much the same with each reminding their wives that medicine’s about saving lives and shouldn’t be thought of as “a business” while the wives are much more practical and actively participate in the trade war that briefly develops between them. The main problem is that, as they cannot understand each other’s languages very well, they encounter many minor misunderstandings that lead to unnecessary conflict and suspicion on both sides.

Tellingly, the younger they are the more of each language the children seem to understand with the youngest two largely bilingual and at times acting as interpreters for their older siblings. Predictably, each of Chen’s sons falls for one of Ng’s daughters, while Ng’s son, recently returned from military service, falls for a cousin of the Chen family. This is a problem in part because Mrs Ng had adopted A-kiok with the intention that she would marry their son Bu-hiong. She has been training her up to take over the administrative side of the clinic and for that reason is put out by the idea that she may marry out of the family, while also worried that If she marries a Mainlander he may take her back to the Mainland with him. Bu-hiong is not interested in marrying A-kiok, mainly because they have been raised as siblings, and in fact declares that he prefers “spicy” Mainland girls to “soft” Taiwanese ones. Their decision to marry people of their own choosing is then is a kind of rebuke of local filial customs which are shown to be old-fashioned in contrast with the otherwise “modern” environment of the Western medical clinic where the cure for everything seems to be an injection.

On the other hand, Chen objects when Mrs Ng brands him “a charlatan”, but the film does at times portray them as akin to snake oil salesmen with their various cure all pills they sell at a permanent discount. Nevertheless, despite their falling-out, the Ngs and Chens eventually come to understand each other and are united by their shared Chineseness. The film’s title then takes on a greater meaning in portraying the two nations as “good neighbours” while otherwise insisting that they are bound by a single culture. Though the film hints at the tensions between the newly arrived waishengren and the already present benshengren, it neatly resolves them simply through the eventual intermarriages of the children that literally make everyone one big family. Perhaps surprisingly, the film never suggests that the Ngs should just learn Mandarin, but leaves space for the continued co-existence of both languages with each sometimes mixed in a single sentence as if symbolising the new cultural integration that the film envisages as an idealised future for a new Taiwan.

Good Neighbors screens as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)