Skip to content
29 Jan – 8 Feb 2026

Turning Gate

Saeng-hwal-eui Bal-gyun

Hong Sangsoo | South Korea | 2002 | 115' | | IFFR 2004

Hong’s perennial subject, already clear in his Tiger Award winner The Day a Pig Fell into the Well, is the way we delude and contradict ourselves in matters of love and/or lust. The more he thinks about it, the funnier he finds it. This time, his plot splits neatly down the middle. Out-of-work actor Kyung-Soo impulsively follows up a call from a one-time schoolmate by visiting him in Chuncheon, a country town famous for its lakes. There he has a brief fling with a dance instructor, who turns out to be his hapless host’s girlfriend. Worried more by her protestations of love than by two timing his host, Kyung-Soo bolts. He takes a train and chats to Sun-Young, who recognises him from his stage work; he gets off at Kyungju to follow her home and next day propositions and beds her. Now Kyung-Soo is the one doing the begging – and Sun-Young has an answer which knocks him sideways. Amazingly, Hong wrote all this day-by-day during the filming. The result is not loose improvisation but plotting as intricate and detailed as anything you’d find in 19th-century fiction, a form explicitly evoked by the film’s seven chapter titles. The two halves are riddled with echoes, parallels and reversals. And it’s really funny. Tony Rayns

Film details

Country of production
South Korea
Year
2002
Festival edition
IFFR 2004
Length
115"
Medium/Format
35mm

You may also like this