in water

“Why is your film blurry, director Hong?” “When it came to the first day of shooting and I was focusing the camera, I just decided to shoot out of focus. I really don’t know. It wasn’t intentional.” Hong Sang-soo’s most experimental work to date disassembles cinema’s elemental structures with a wink to the spontaneous whims of the artistic process. The story is simple: a young director and two friends spend the weekend on Jeju Island. They wander, search for creative inspiration, drink soju, rinse and repeat. Hong conveys this sparse narrative in shafts of light, daubs of colour and smudged forms along a rocky coastline. Such impressionistic images demand active spectatorship and a recalibrated attentiveness to cinema’s sensual pleasures.