Nobody’s Daughter Haewon

Unfortunately, director Hong Sang-soo can no longer attend the screenings of this film.

Since his debut in 1996, the South Korean filmmaker (and NYFF regular) Hong Sang-soo’s oeuvre has grown organically, layer by layer, with each new film building on the overtones and ramifications of the one preceding it. Few artists in the medium work with such freedom, and fewer still make films of such complexity expressed with such eloquent simplicity and with such attention to place and season. In Hong’s 14th movie, a chamber-piece, a young film student named Haewon (Jeong Eun-Chae) finds herself at loose ends when her mother moves to Canada. She clings to her married lover, a film professor (Lee Sun-Kyun), and is bowled over by the insights of another professor (Kim Eui-seong) living in San Diego. Meanwhile, she struggles to find her own way and her own identity the way we all do when we’re young: a little bit at a time, encounter by encounter, experience by experience, in reality and in dreams.