Acropolis Cinema
Bringing experimental, international, and undistributed films to Los Angeles
Déjà vu: A Hong Sangsoo Double Bill
Tale of Cinema & Nobody's Daughter Haewon (2005/2013)
Date: June 18, 2022
Time: 5:00pm: Nobody's Daughter Haewon | 8:00pm: Tale of Cinema
Location: 2220 Arts + Archives
Address: 2220 Beverly Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90057
Los Angeles launch of Dennis Lim's new book on Hong Sangsoo! Dennis Lim in person!
Hong Sangsoo is one of world cinema's most distinguished and prolific filmmakers. His sixth feature, Tale of Cinema, uses a multilayered film-within-a-film to tell two stories: that of a depressive young man who forms a suicide pact with a friend and that of a filmmaker who sees a film he believes was based on his life, and who meets its lead actress in a collision of fantasy and reality.
In Nobody's Daughter Haewon, a chamber piece at once eloquently simple and deceptively complex, 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 filmmaker/professor (Lee Sun-kyun), and is bowled over by the insights of another professor (Kim Eui-seong) visiting from San Diego. Meanwhile, she struggles to find her own way and her own identity as we all do when we’re young: a little bit at a time, encounter by encounter, experience by experience, in reality and in dreams. (AGFA/Filmlinc)
Acropolis presents a special double bill of two rarely screened Hong features on occasion of Dennis Lim's monograph on the film—part of Fireflies Press’s Decadent Editions, which cover essential works of world cinema from the first decade of the 2000s. Copies of the book TALE OF CINEMA, including a limited number signed by Lim, will be available to purchase after the screening. Lim will participate in a discussion of Hong's career between the two screenings.
In person: Dennis Lim
Tale of Cinema is simply told but resonates with profound meaning.
Ed Gonzalez, Slant Magazine
Nobody's Daughter Haewon is teasing, poignant, enigmatic. Think of Eric Rohmer, add sadness, set in Seoul.
Nigel Andrews, Financial Times
A crucial film. [In Tale of Cinema], Hong delineates character with the lightest of strokes... rarely have intimate love scenes been so bluntly physical yet so dramatically precise.
Richard Brody, The New Yorker
Emotionally honest in its late-bloomer humility... [Tale of Cinema is] a love-story diptych whose two halves reflect and refract upon one another through the all-seeing eye of film itself.
Aaron Hillis, Premiere Magazine
By the end of Nobody's Daughter Haewon, there's a feeling of having completed the routines the film has set out and, perhaps, achieved a sort of understanding. It might be too much to hope for catharsis, much less transcendence, but at least we might be able to move forward.
Leo Goldsmith, Reverse Shot
