Kwon (Seo Young-hwa) returns to Seoul from a restorative stay in the mountains. She is given a packet of letters left by Mori (Ryo Kase, Like Someone In Love), who has come back from Japan to propose to her. As she walks down a flight of stairs, Kwon drops and scatters the letters, all of which are undated. When she reads them, she has to make sense of the chronology…and so must we. Shot in the narrow alleys, petite cafes and beautiful hanok inns of Seoul’s historic Jong-ro district, a favorite Hong location, Hill of Freedom is a masterful, alternately funny and haunting tale of love and longing from the great director.
A note from Senior Programmer Andrew Jupin: Seeing this listing may be giving you a sense of déjà vu: “Didn’t he write a note about the new Hong Sangsoo movie last week?,” you may be asking yourself. Indeed, I absolutely did and you 100% should not miss that one. That said, in my note for Yourself and Yours, I mentioned that Director Hong is an incredibly prolific director—and I wasn’t kidding! It would seem a perfect storm of Hong’s almost film-a-year output and the American film market’s effort to play catch-up has produced a situation where two different film companies are releasing recent works by the director at the same time! Along with Yourself and Yours, the completely delightful Hill of Freedom—which I originally saw back at the 52nd New York Film Festival in 2014, but is only seeing a proper US release this month—is another solid effort from Hong that will delight audiences and help provide an escape for a quick 67 minutes. And because you can never get enough Hong Sangsoo, we’re also offering his 2006 masterpiece, Woman on the Beach, among our repertory releases. I strongly encourage you to take a look at all three films if you can, especially if you’ve never had the pleasure of experiencing the magic of Director Hong’s work before. And considering we’re virtually playing three films by the same director at the same time, this is probably the closest I’ll get to being able to offer a retrospective anytime soon, so please enjoy!
