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Hong Sang-Soo Biography

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MARITAL STATUS
Professions Director , Screenwriter , Producer more
Pseudo Hong Sangsoo
Nationality Korean
Birth October 25, 1960 (Seoul – South Korea)

BIOGRAPHY
Son of a South Korean army officer and a film production house employee, Hong Sang-soo discovered cinema by watching Hollywood films on television. During a lively conversation, a theater man suggests that this idle boy take up directing. Hong Sang-soo then enrolled at Chungang University in Seoul, in the “Theater and Cinema” department. He then moved to the United States, studying at the College of Arts and Crafts in California and the Art Institute of Chicago, where he made several experimental short films.

This lover of Rohmer and Cézanne, who lived for a year in France, experienced an aesthetic shock when he discovered at the age of 27 The Journal of a Country Priest by Robert Bresson , a film which convinced him to turn to a more narrative cinema . In 1996 he directed his first feature film, The Day the Pig Fell into the Well, followed two years later by The Power of Kangwon Province (shot in black and white). These first works, like The Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Suitors (2000), were praised by critics and won awards at festivals (Rotterdam, Vancouver, Pusan). Sang-soo describes with remarkable detail the daily lives of young Koreans, their conflicting couple relationships and their latent existential unease.

With his reputation, Hong Sang-soo had more comfortable means for Turning Gate (2004), co-produced by Marin Karmitz and performed by three local stars. In this fourth opus, which achieved great public success in Korea, the director refines his style while remaining faithful to his theme. Alcohol and sex play a large part in his cinema, which audaciously mixes poetry and triviality, abstraction and crudeness, melancholy and humor. We find these characteristics in Woman is the Future of Man (2004) and Tale of Cinema (2005), both of which are in competition at the Cannes Film Festival.

Now a festival regular, Hong Sang-soo presents Night and Day (2008) in Berlin. This sentimental stroll through the streets of the 14th arrondissement of Paris is his first feature film shot outside Korea. Increasingly verbose at the dawn of the 2010s, the filmmaker expresses himself as much on cinema screens as through the short format ( Eo-ddeon bang-moon , Cheopcheopsanjung ). He made his big return to the Croisette in 2010 with HA HA HA , which won the Un Certain Regard Prize. The same year with Oki’s Movie, Sang-soo offers, in the form of sketches, a variation on the theme of hesitation in love. In 2011, the filmmaker was again selected at Cannes in the Un Certain Regard category for The Day He Arrives (Calm Mornings in Seoul) , a stroll between dream and reality in the South Korean capital.

The following year, the director worked with Isabelle Huppert for In Another Country . Very prolific, the Korean continued with Sunhi , Haewon and the Men , Hill of Freedom and One Day With, One Day Without in 2016. Between 2017 and 2018, Hong Sang-soo directed 4 other films, Yourself and Yours , The Day of after , Alone on the beach at night and La Caméra de Claire , in which he found Isabelle Huppert. Hong Sang-soo likes to explore themes that are dear to him: the romantic encounter between two artists and the discovery of the other and conflicting relationships, like Night and Day (2010), The Day He Arrives (2011) , The Virgin stripped bare by her suitors (2004) or A day with, a day without (2016), whose form is also fragmented and non-linear.

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