Hill of Freedom (2014)
Hill of Freedom (2014)
Hill of Freedom (2014)
(Ja-yu-eui-eon-deok, Hong Sang-soo, South Korea 2014, 66 min., Korean w/ subtitles)
Director Hong’s penchant for fractured or repeating narratives comes to full fruition in the structure of this film. Kwon (Seo Young-hwa), returning from Seoul after a vacation, finds a stack of letters waiting for her from her lover, Mori (Ryo Kase), who had returned to Korea from Japan after two years. As Kwon takes the letters home, she drops them down a stairwell, scattering them in a random order. Director Hong adapts these letters into vignettes of Mori’s return to Korea, encountering them in the order Kwon reads them rather than in a linear narrative. Kwon, and the audience, need to reconstruct the narrative to follow Mori’s journey, and his changing feelings toward Kwon.