SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 4
New York City’s Museum of the Moving Image
A Quiet Dream (춘몽)
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 3:00 P.M.
Dir. Zhang Lu. 2016, 98 mins. With Han Ye-ri, Yang Ik-june, Park Jung-bum, Yoon Jong-bin. In Korean with English subtitles. The loveable opening film of the 2016 Busan Film Festival follows three goofballs vying for the affection of the attractive owner (Han Ye-ri) of a dive bar in a scrappy Seoul neighborhood. The three wooers are well-known actor-directors riffing on their own films. Yang Ik-june plays a vagabond gangster (as in Breathless), Park Jung-bum is a defector from North Korea (as in The Journals of Musan), and Yoon Jong-bin’s character is reminiscent of the army private he played in Unforgiven. From this clever conceit, director Zhang Lu spins what Variety‘s Maggie Lee called a “whimsical, frequently poetic urban rhapsody buoyed by its deadpan dropout protagonists.”
Yourself and Yours (당신자신과 당신의 것)
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 5:00 P.M.
Dir. Hong Sang-soo. 2016, 86 mins. With Kim Joo-hyuk, Lee Yoo-young. In Korean with English subtitles. The prolific Hong Sang-soo boldly and wittily continues his ongoing exploration of the painful caprices of modern romance that was inspired by Luis Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire. 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. (New York Film Festival).
Bamseom Pirates Seoul Inferno (밤섬해적단 서울불바다)
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 7:00 P.M.
Dir. Jung Yoon-suk. 2017, 120 min. In Korean with English subtitles. An audience favorite at the recent Rotterdam and New York Asian Film Festivals, Jung Yoon-suk’s appropriately irreverent documentary follows the anarchic exploits of the Bamseom Pirates, a politically outspoken, gleefully nonconformist two-man punk band. Performing mainly at street protests and political rallies, their satirical antics, which include blasting through one hundred songs in ten minutes in their first gig and titling one of their songs “All Hail Kim Jong-il,” take aim at the absurdities, inequality, and corruption of South Korean society. But they learn just how far they can go when their manager is arrested for posting allegedly pro-North Korean tweets.