Running from August into the coming spring, Harvard Film Archive’s retrospective of Korean director Hong Sang-soo is something every serious cinephile cannot miss.

The program, comprising all of Hong’s films so far, is divided into four seasonal chapters, matching the different seasonal settings of the films. The first instalment, Summer & Fall, started in August, and will end on Nov. 9 with “The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well”, Hong’s debut film from 1996.

For the final chapter in spring 2026, Hong will be invited to make an appearance in person at the HFA along with actress Kim Min-hee, who has been in a relationship with Hong since 2015 and features prominently in his recent works.

HFA, a division of Harvard Library, is located in the Carpenter Centre for the Visual Arts on Harvard’s campus, about a 10-minute walk from Harvard Square and accessible by the Red Line. It was founded in 1979 by Robert Gardner, Vlada K. Petric, and Stanley Cavell, and has since accumulated a diverse collection of films from around the world and every period in film history.

According to the HFA website, its full collection amounts to some “40,000 motion picture prints, audiovisual elements and ephemera.”

Apart from serving as an archive, HFA also does regular film screenings for the public. Ranging from Federico Fellini to Ozu Yasujiro, its uniquely inspired programmes have shared the fascination of film year after year with students and local residents.

The Hong Sang-soo retrospective runs alongside other retrospectives on Naruse Mikio, Gore Vidal, and a host of other more contemporary directors. It is also the latest addition to HFA’s already extensive repertoire of Korean and East Asian cinema.

Hong’s films are often said to have a style all their own. They are plotless, repetitive, undramatic, and elusive—especially for those watching him for the first time. Indeed, as the joke goes, Hong might as well have been making the same film over and over. Almost all of his films share a handful of themes. They tell “intimate, stripped-down, present-day stories of love, friendship and loneliness”, as the HFA puts it. They do so in a cryptic fashion that awes and frustrates the audience. His works mirror life from a slightly slanted angle, foregrounding its more raw and unadorned aspects as well as the paradox and mystery lurking under its mundaneness.

In Hong’s films, conversations, not actions, drive the plot. Many of the scenes take place indoors, in enclosed and relatively private spaces such as schools, hotels, empty cafes, and apartment rooms. The characters are invariably mid-conversation, despite always talking past each other. In signature Hong fashion, these dialogue-heavy episodes are punctuated by sex and drinking parties. Hong is also an eager experimenter with meta-narrative techniques. Breaking up the chronology, fracturing and juxtaposing different stories, or making them happen twice with slight variations, are some of his favourite tricks.

As anyone who watched more than a few of his films will notice, the figures that most frequently come up are those that live in the same milieu as Hong himself. They are academics, artists, actresses and students, and film directors. In an interview at the 2015 Locarno Film Festival, he said that the choice came as a natural one, because these are the circles he travels in and the people he’s familiar with. His “temperament,” he explained, “is to work with the things I know already, and then find new things.” And the result, over many a thematically kindred film, is a sense of spontaneity that strongly colours his work.

The spontaneity also partly stems from his production methods. Hong doesn’t prepare scripts beforehand; instead he prefers to write them up in the morning on the day shooting takes place. He also uses much of what he shoots, so that sometimes the editing process is condensed into a mere day or two. This fast-paced, budget-friendly approach has made him perhaps the most prolific director alive whose works manage to continue attracting acclaim. And, as Dennis Lim wrote in the New Yorker, its modesty and pragmatism are also essential to Hong’s “breezy irreverence” and “emotional and philosophical depth.”

Each year, Hong’s new films routinely premier at the handful of renowned international film festivals, in Berlin, Venice, Cannes, and New York. In the 2017 New York Film Festival, two of Hong’s films were screened—an honor reserved only for the most important directors, such as Jean-Luc Godard and Rainer Werner.

Despite his frequent appearances at the top festivals, Hong is not considered a director of equal moment as Edward Yang or Hou Hsiao-hsien. As Philip Lapote puts it in NYRB, “Hong eschews the self-important and ostentatiously ambitious, preferring instead to build delicate cinematic structures out of seemingly offhand, casually playful, sardonic observations.”

Having seen one of his films, you’ll likely not be impressed. It may have at various points perplexed you, interested you, or made you chuckle, but there’s not much more to it than that. As you watch more and more, however, you will begin to appreciate his style. Worse, you’ll be hooked—as Lapote puts it, “a happy captive of Hong’s world.”

Harry Li

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history major. concerned about BC dining.

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