Winter in Sokcho

Soo-ha is twenty five and works at a guesthouse in Sokcho. It is winter; the shore is empty, the hotels closed, and the town sits right beside the border. She lives with her mother. Her father is French; she never saw him and her mother will not discuss it. A guest arrives at the guesthouse. Yan Kerrand is a French comics artist; he has come here for a new book and works in his room. Soo-ha keeps him company. Nothing forms between them but a closeness grows. He does not show her what he draws. Koya Kamura directs; he wrote the screenplay with Stéphane Ly-Cuong. Bella Kim plays Soo-ha and Roschdy Zem plays Kerrand. It is a French production; the languages are Korean and French. The source is Elisa Shua Dusapin's novel; the writer is of French and Korean descent and the book was translated into many languages. The film runs a hundred and four minutes. Kamura won best director at the Bergamo Film Meeting; the film took the world cinema prize at Galway. The matter it treats is being in between; Soo-ha is not counted fully Korean and belongs nowhere else. The narrative renders the drawing in animation and the distance between two languages is built formally. Sokcho in winter and the border region work inside the narrative. Its limit is pace; there is almost no event and the narrative is deliberately still. Who it is for: viewers who like quiet European and Asian drama. Who it is not for: it is very slow, has little event, and the ending is left open.