Riceboy Sleeps

Seoul-born Canadian filmmaker Anthony Shim’s second feature is an achingly intimate portrait of a mother’s love for her son. With delicacy and tenderness that never tips into sentimentality, Shim charts the difficulties faced by So-young and Dong-hyun as they attempt to fit into Canadian suburbia in a time when virtually no support was available. Years later we meet Dong-hyung (now known as David) as a wayward teenager who’s grown distant from his mother until a critical event takes them on an unpredictable journey into their Korean past. This shot-on-16mm treasure, drawing laudatory comparisons with Minari (SFF 2021), is superbly performed by dancer-turned-actor Choi Seung-yoon in her first feature role and 2022 TIFF Rising Star award winner Ethan Hwang.