“The women are the true heroes, the brave ones. Violated (defeated?), as they are, they remain the masters of time, of the time that divides the past and the present of the story, of all the time lost to the men. I often think about the end of The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well, both suicide and take-off. This scene has haunted me ever since I laid eyes on it because it forces us to instantly return to the film’s structure, to the knot of suffering that ties together all characters.”
Claire Denis1
“Poetic by its precision, attentive to duration, to the uncertainty of the moment, to outlined movements and to what they betray or control: Hong Sang-soo’s cinema seems to consist only of details, of contingent moments that suddenly get out of hand or explode. ‘I never aim for generalization; there’s never a global view on society at the origin of a film or even a shot. It seems to me that reality can only appear between the cracks of discrete, hypothetic, uncertain elements. I am wary of clichés and big expressions. I do not believe, for example, that something we could call ‘the’ contemporary Korea exists. I never try to share a truth, but only approximations.’”2