The Day He Arrives + Yourself and Yours

6:30pm The Day He Arrives (79m) | 35mm
In this signature Hong film, a creatively blocked director currently teaching film (Yoo Joon-sang) arrives in Seoul to meet with an old friend, only for that friend to seemingly stand him up. He then sets about wandering the streets, encountering several women and drinking a fair amount of soju along the way. The night draws to a close and a new day dawns, though this new day feels suspiciously similar to the one that preceded it… An audacious, Buñuelian black-and-white experiment in repetition, narrative time, and casting, The Day He Arrives encapsulates many of the themes and formal strategies that continue to inform Hong’s work today.

8:00pm Yourself and Yours (86m)
For his 18th feature, Hong boldly and wittily continues his ongoing exploration of the painful caprices of modern romance. Painter Young-soo (Kim Joo-hyuk) hears secondhand that his girlfriend, Min-jung (Lee Yoo-young), has recently had (many) drinks with an unknown man. This leads to a quarrel that seems to end their relationship. The next day, Young-soo sets out in search of Min-jung, while she—or a woman who looks exactly like her and may or may not be her twin—has a series of encounters with strange men, some of whom claim to have met her before… Yourself and Yours is a break-up/make-up comedy unlike any other, suffused with sophisticated modernist mystery. An NYFF54 selection.