On the Beach at Night Alone

December 13, 2017 · Regal Riviera · 7:00 p.m.

Art imitates life in this quietly devastating masterpiece from Hong Sangsoo. Kim Minhee (The Handmaiden, Right Now, Wrong Then)—in the role that won her the Silver Bear for best actress in Berlin—plays Younghee, an actress reeling in the aftermath of an affair with a married film director. Younghee visits Hamburg then returns to Korea, but as she meets with friends and has her fair share to drink, increasingly startling confessions emerge.

No stranger to mining his own experience for his films, Hong, whose real-life affair with Kim stirred up a media frenzy in Korea, here confronts his personal life with a newfound emotional directness. With an incredibly raw and vulnerable performance from Kim at its center, On the Beach at Night Alone is one of the most dynamic collaborations between director and performer in contemporary cinema.

“Unfussy in form, open in expression and gentle in reach as its maker revisits such recurring preoccupations as loneliness, regret and the value of love in life and art.” — Variety

About the Filmmaker

Hong Sangsoo was born in 1960 in Seoul and studied filmmaking at Chungang University before receiving a BFA from California College of Arts and Crafts and an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1996, he made an astounding debut with his first feature film The Day a Pig Fell into the Well. Since then, through the 21 films he has written and directed, Hong has enjoyed exploring the complex architecture beneath his characters’ seemingly random lives. Renowned for his unique cinematographic language and aesthetic choices, Hong Sangsoo is one of the most established auteurs in contemporary Korean cinema.