Screen/Society--"By the Stream"(Hong Sangsoo, 2024)

Film Screening:

"By the Stream"
(Hong Sangsoo, 2024, 111 min, South Korea, Korean with English subtitles, DCP)

Successful former director Chu Sieon (Kwon Haehyo), now working quietly as a bookshop owner, has arrived at a university to direct a short theater piece after its student director has been let go from the project. He appears at the invitation of his niece, Jeonim (Kim Minhee), an artist and teacher whom he hasn't seen in 10 years. Living with regrets about decisions made at this very university decades earlier, Chu Sieon both rebuilds his family bond and forges a new one with the admiring Professor Jeong (Cho Yunhee). Hong Sangsoo's latest portrait of people discovering emotional kinship and recharging their creative selves is wondrous in its simplicity yet expansive in feeling. BY THE STREAM is a deeply affectionate rendering of the constant process of self-actualization, whether in youth or late middle-age.

"It's a film of slightly drunken, ultimately dignified humility." - Zachary Barnes, Wall Street Journal

"A comic charm." - Peter Bradshaw, Guardian

"BY THE STREAM is a wry comedy of manners that muses, in its unassuming way, on the creative act." - Wendy Ide, Observer