A man awakes to find himself trapped in a dirty, confined crawlspace. He barely has enough room to move. He also has no memory of why he's there, or why he's bleeding from a stomach wound. Apparently drugged, he occasionally 'zones out' of his surroundings as he tries to edge towards his way to freedom. But the more he explores, the more pain he has to endure, and the more frightening his predicament becomes.
After a chance meeting, a man and a woman stroll through Seoul’s changing streets.
Chang-seok's marriage failed and he is about to publish a novel based on his own experience. After he meets various people, Chang-seok changes his mind and starts weaving yet another story.
In 1978, five leftist youths who believed that the leftist revolution could be realized through politics, not violence, gathered in a house and started to talk about the magazine they had published. The unexpected events that take place later that night reveal the political chaos in Turkey before the 1980 coup d'état.
Samsara is the Buddhist cycle of death and reincarnation. From the temples of Laos, we will accompany a soul in its transit from one body to another through the bardo.
A sheep farmer whose remote and quiet life is disturbed by the arrival of both his lover and his twin sister.
A housemaid, working in an exclusive gated community in the outskirts of Buenos Aires, embarks on a journey of sexual and mental liberation in a nudist swinger-club boarding the high security walls.
The awkward, distant, and wounded three sisters gather at their hometown for their father's birthday. However, on the day of the party, there is a big mess because of their little brother Jin-seob's abnormal behavior, and the past of the three sisters slowly reveals.
One of three films commissioned by the Jeonju International Film Festival in 2005. A couple escaped their family to look for a spiritual tree in the jungle. There is a song at night, a song that spoke about an innocent idea of love and a quest for happiness. Worldly Desires is an experimental project where I invited a filmmaker friend, Pimpaka Towira, to shoot the love story by day and the song by night. The story, Deep Red Bloody Night, was written by my assistant who wanted to reprise a forbidden love story in a more romantic time in the past. I picked a pop song, Will I be Lucky? to convey a sense of guiltless freedom one feels when being hit by love. The video is a little simulation of manners, dedicated to the memories of filmmaking in the jungle during the year 2001-2005. -Apichatpong Weerasethakul
In South Korea, 2002, the Democratic Party put the presidential nomination to a plebiscite for the first time. Amongst numerous candidates, the one who brought about the most unexpected result was a fringe candidate named Roh Moo-hyun.
Hong Sang-soo's Lost in the Mountains depicts Mi-sook's suffering when she discovers her friend Jin-young has been secretly sleeping with her lover.
EXIT: Woo-hyun lives a small-time criminal life earning his life as a pick-pocket. He often pays attention to an arrow-shaped-tattoo of his girlfriend which is on the genital area. He calls it ‘the emergency exit.’ THE BODY: Jung-su and Young-sun are a young couple. One new year’s eve, a movie director visits the couple’s house. Only the strong wind of the sea and slow time cross the living room and three people sense something…alive. WALTZING ON THUNDER: Mi-jung just happens to meet a group of people who have survived from being struck by lightning. While becoming aware of her old wound, she takes part in a trip for lightning strikes ‘again’.
High school student Min-sik moves to a rural village with his family. There he meets Ye-joo, a classmate who became a social outcast after her father was accused of murder.
Hong Sang-Soo’s Lost in the Mountains (South Korea, 32min) the visitor is the supremely self-centred Mi-Sook, who drives to Jeonju on impulse to see her classmate Jin-Young – only to discover that her friend is having an affair with their married professor, who Mi-Sook once dated herself. The level of social embarrassment goes off the scale. In Naomi Kawase’s Koma (Japan, 34min), Kang Jun-Il travels to a village in rural Japan to honour his grandfather’s dying wish by returning a Buddhist scroll to its ancestral home. Amid ancient superstitions, a new relationship forms. And in Lav Diaz’ Butterflies Have No Memories (Philippines, 42min) ‘homecoming queen’ Carol returns to the economically depressed former mining town she came from – and becomes the target of an absurd kidnapping plot hatched by resentful locals. Serving as his own writer, cameraman and editor, Diaz casts the film entirely from members of his crew and delivers a well-seasoned mix of social realism and fantasy. —bfi
Low-ranking civil servant Pil Yong (Park Joong Hoon) has things hard looking after his disabled wife(Ye Ji Won). He takes charge of a hanji project in hopes it will bring him a promotion. His wife comes from a family of hanji masters. One of his tasks include working with quarrelsome filmmaker Ji Won (Kang Su Yeon), who is shooting a documentary about hanji. Though he knows little about the subject to begin with, the more he learns about hanji, the more it takes on a new significance for him and the world around him.
Following the death of her two children, Isadora Duncan created the solo Mother in which a mother cradles her child in a moment of extreme tenderness, then lets it go. A century later, four women encounter this heart-rending dance.
Novelist Jeong-seok is looking for his missing wife. A woman appears in front of him and suggests that she can find his wife. Meanwhile, some people approach him and ask him to find missing people. They find themselves becoming chased at some point.
A married poet meets a teenage boy working at a donut shop and helplessly develops feelings for him.
A middle-age couple visit a temple in Chuncheon where they spent their first night together 30 years prior. On the way, one of them cannot find their phone and hurries to find it. As the night unravels, they will come across an ex-lover, a friend, and a young couple who resemble them 30 years ago.
You earn as much as you work, and you live off that money. This simple proposition has always been a problem for Jung-cheol. At the soybean paste factory he went to work for in the bitter winter, he dreams of travelling to warm Philippines in spring - as long as he survives the winter making his portion of the soybean paste that he promised the boss. But the more he struggles to live, the worse it gets. And soon, the fermentation room turns musty with the black mold spreading from the thousands of ferment boiled soybean lumps.
