Cinema Releases - In Front of Your Face

In Front of Your Face

23 Sept

In Front of Your Face suggests that perhaps the most important things in this life are also the most immediate.

After years living abroad, former actress Sangok (Lee Hyeyoung) is back in Seoul, staying with her sister Jeongok (Cho Yunhee) in her high-rise apartment. Whilst Sangok becomes re-accustomed to life in Korea, the sisters have a lie-in, enjoy breakfast in a cafe and visit a restaurant owned by Jeongok's son. But as the detail of Sangok's day accrue (a spill on her blouse, an encounter at her childhood home), it becomes clear that there is much she is not revealing. These mysterious circumstances may have something to do with her decision to meet with film director Jaewon (Kwon Haehyo) to discuss her return to acting.

She meets the director in a bar that’s closed, so order in a Chinese meal, plus ample Chinese liquor, where they both flirt and make unfulfillable promises.

Lee Hyeyoung is very well known in Korea, but this was her first role for the prolific Hong Sangsoo.

85 min/South Korea/Korean with English subtitles/2021/Cert 12A

World Premiere – Cannes Premieres – Cannes Film Festival

UK Premiere, Korean Film Festival 13th November, Picturehouse Central, London, 18:00

Week Commencing 27 November

Week Starting 23 September

BFI Southbank	Belvedere Rd	London SE1 8XT	020 7928 3232	all week
Cine Lumiere	17 Queensberry Place	London SW7 2DT	020 7871 3515	all week
Arthouse Crouch End	159a Tottenham Lane	Londonn N8 9BT	020 8 245 3099	all week
Showroom Cinema	Paternoster Row	Sheffield S1 2BX	0114 275 7727	all week
Tyneside	10 Pilgrim Street	Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 6QG	0191 227 5500	all week
ICA Cinema	The Mall	London SW1 5AH	020 7930 3647	all week
Depot	Pinwell Road	Lewis, BN7 2JS	01273 525354	all week
Curzon Bloomsbury	Brunswick Centre	London WC1N 1NQ	01233 555 644	all week
HOME	2 Tony Wilson Place	Manchester M15 4FN	0161 200 1500	all week
Watershed	1 Canon's Road	Bristol BS1 5TX	0117 927 6444	all week
BFI Player
Curzon Home Cinema

12 Rose Street

Glasgow G3 6RB

0141 332 6535

13-16 Nov

HOME

2 Tony Wilson Place

Manchester M15 4FN

0161 2001500

all week

Week Commencing 20 November

Week Commencing 27 November

Week Starting 30 September

BFI Southbank	Belvedere Rd	London SE1 8XT	020 7928 3232	to Oct 4
ICA Cinema	The Mall	London SW1 5AH	020 7930 3647	all week
Cine Lumiere	17 Queensberry Place	London SW7 2DT	020 7871 3515	Oct 2 & 6
Filmhouse	88 Lothian Road	Edinburgh EH3 9BZ	0131 228 2688	30 Sept - 3 Oct
Chapter	Market Road,	Cardiff CF5 1QE	029 2031 1050	30 Sept & 3-6th Oct
Curzon Home Cinema
BFI Player

Week Starting 7 October

ICA Cinema	The Mall	London SW1 5AH	020 7930 3647	8,11,12,13 Oct
DCA	152 Nethergate	Dundee DD1 4DY	01382 4324444	all week
Palace Cinema	Harbour St	Broadstairs CT10 1ET	01843 865 726	9 Oct & 11 Oct only
Palas	15 Merchants Rd Lower	Galway	091 384 800	all week
Curzon Home Cinema
BFI Player

Week Starting 14th October

ICA Cinema	The Mall	London SW1 5AH	020 7930 3647	14,19,20 Oct
Eden Court	Bishops Road	Inverness IV3 5SA		5 days (not on15&17)
Palas	15 Merchants Rd Lower	Galway	091 384 800	14,15,17,18,20 Oct
Curzon Home Cinema
BFI Player

Week Starting 21st October

Week starting 28th October

Robert Burns Centre	Dumfries	31 Oct only

★★★★
"Quiet cine-literate magic from Korean auteur. Shot with pleasing simplicity and an unhurried flow…a subtle portrait of emotional resilience with its female protagonist seeking to remain mindful in the face of life’s transience.’ Hong has carried on, making fascinating, subtle, humane films with the bare minimum…Once again, he casts a tender, sympathetic gaze on a female character
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

“A colourful and relatable work that crystallises many of Hong’s best tropes. As always, Hong’s style and form is imperious, with naturalistic conversations captured in organic, free-flowing long takes – creating a transfixing atmosphere in which the actors’ exceptional craft is laid bare.”
James Balmont, Another Magazine

★★★★★
“Packed with emotion and an underlying reflective quality...the film just gives you so much to unpack. Repeat viewing essential. This is another subtle jewel, wise and charming, insouciant yet measured, and somehow squaring the circle between the overwhelming sadness of lost time and the glint of eternity in a passing instant.”
Trevor Johnston, Little White Lies

★★★★
"An ex actress's return to Seoul is beautific and drunkenly raw, in Hong Sangsoo's latest...
Hong takes in the solid geometric strangeness of Seoul's proliferating tower blocks, too, and human awkardness grits the grace. It's pure pleasure to watch his people."
Nick Hasted, The Arts Desk

“A gentle pleasure... a typically meditative study from Korean director Hong Sang. Lee Hye-yeong is mesmerising as a former actor...”
Wendy Ide, The Observer

“Hong’s cinema appears on the surface to be slight, yet there’s something deeply affecting about it. Although it’s set up and staged for the camera, it feels very down to earth and ordinary, just like real life. No other living director of who I’m aware does anything quite like Hong, his films these days are something very special. Like much of Hong’s recent output, this is a film to be cherished.”Jeremy Clarke, Jeremy C Processing.com

★★★★★
"A typically minimalist outing, director Hong’s film is a devastating drama whose affect creeps up on the audience so quietly that it is barely noticeable until after the final blow has landed.
A captivating film of deep emotional power; like weeds slowly cracking the pavement above, its movements in isolation are barely felt but its effects are profound.”
Christopher Machell, Cinevue

★★★★
“Shot with pleasing simplicity and an unhurried flow…a subtle portrait of emotional resilience with its female protagonist seeking to remain mindful in the face of life’s transience."
Tom Dawson, Total Film

“Small is beautiful and luminous in In Front of Your Face (Dangsin-Eolgul-Apeseo), the 11th film of South Korean writer-director Hong Sangsoo to be invited to Cannes…
"Typical of Hong’s work, the laid-back anti-storytelling lets daily life flow slowly by without incident, until a revelatory twist in the last act gives the film its meaning.”
Deborah Young, Hollywood Reporter

“The substitution of Chinese liquor for soju is only the most minor change in Hong Sangsoo's latest, subtly different delight...…an unexpected peal of utterly genuine, soul-repairing laughter."
…wonderful, winsome…”
Jessica Kiang, Variety

“Prolific Korean auteur, Hong Sangsoo, delights with his second film of 2021, a poignant and typically minimalist story set beneath the shifting skyline of Seoul.”
"One of Hong's most moving films...a love letter to Seoul and a superb character study of the beatific presence of mind and body with which one woman faces death...tinged with the beauty and sadness of transience."
Becca Voelcker, Sight & Sound

“The film is an obsessive rumination on the little squabbles and inconveniences and pleasures that add up to the bulk of our lives.”
Chuck Bowen, Slant Magazine

“Audiences bruised by the pandemic clearly need the escapism of F9 and other tentpoles; but at a time of fragility, they also need reminding of the lambent beauty of our everyday world that Hong delivers here.
"In Front Of Your Face feels as if the director is testing the limits of how far he can pare a story back while retaining an intricate series of echoes, hints and suggestions.”
Lee Marshall, Screen International

“In Front of Your Face" is one of the South Korean director's most open films of late, poignant in its use of a simple structure to touch on the eminently difficult question of how to live happily between past, present and future.”
Elena Lazic, The Playlist

“The great Hong Sangsoo…glories in the power of the cinema. The overwhelming mystery of life in the presence of death inspires Hong to new heights of imaginative inspiration and reveals all the more clearly the essence of his artistry.”"Intimate and fluid...(a) serenely passionate deployment of art as resistance to mortality."
Richard Brody, The New Yorker

"One of the very best films from one of the very best filmmakers working today."
Joshua Brunsting, Criterion Cast

“One of Hong’s most emotionally generous films. In a career full of small triumphs, it’s a beautiful gesture of family love, of non-specific spiritual awakening, and self-possession meant to create outward waves of goodness. And it comes down to Sangok’s words, repeated throughout, until they take root and grow: “If I can see what’s in front of my face, then I’m not afraid.”
Dave White, The Wrap

"Like a short story, In Front of Your Face makes a lot out of very little. It is a masterclass in economical filmmaking (there are approximately six locations used throughout the film), and a reminder that Hong is not only among the best filmmakers working today, but also simply one of cinema’s greatest storytellers, who can consistently sum up our absurd and incredible human experience in less than 90 minutes."
K.F. Watanabe, Screen Slate

“Humble but winning outing from Hong…(an)intimate portrait of an aging movie actress, Sangok (Lee Hye-young) …ends with a fantastic extended restaurant scene between Lee and Kwon Hae-hyo as Jaewon, a director from her past.”
Max Maller, The Chicago Reader

Top ^

CREW

Written, Directed and Produced by		Hong Sangsoo
Production Manager, Stills Photographer		Kim Minhee
Production Assistant		Lee Soyoung
Cinematography, Editing, Music		Hong Sangsoo
Sound		Seo Jihoon

Production		Jeonwonsa Film Co.

CAST

Lee Hyeyoung
Cho Yunhee
Kwon Haehyo
Shin Seokho
Kim Saebyeok
Ha Seungguk
Seo Younghwa
Lee Eunmi
Kang Yiseo
Kim Siha

South Korea 2021 / 85 minutes / 1:1.85 /2.0
BBFC cert 12A