Columbus

Kogonada's first feature. The pseudonym comes from Kogo Noda, Ozu's screenwriter, and the film does not hide it: locked-off camera, symmetrical framing, shots of empty rooms. The subject is Columbus, Indiana. A small American town, but within a few blocks there are buildings by I. M. Pei, César Pelli, Kevin Roche and Skidmore, Owings and Merrill; an unlikely capital of modernist architecture. Jin works as a translator in Seoul and gets stuck in the town when his estranged father, an architecture professor, falls into a coma there. Casey is nineteen and local, devoted to the architecture but unable to leave a mother struggling with addiction in order to study. The two of them talk their way around the town on foot. The film shoots the buildings as actors rather than scenery. In some scenes the people stay at the edge of the frame, the structure holds the centre, and the conversation is heard from outside. John Cho and Haley Lu Richardson lead. It was shot on location in 2016 and premiered at Sundance. Who it is for: viewers who like slow, quiet films that talk through architecture. Who it is not for: anyone who wants incident. Almost nothing happens, and what is between Jin and Casey is deliberately left undefined.