Winter in Sokcho review – atmospheric slow-burner about family and intimacy in South Korean border city

Koya Kamura’s debut film is about shared identities at the centre of quiet, chilly drama as an enigmatic French writer visits the eponymous townAdapted from a novel by Swiss-Korean writer Elisa Shua Dusapin, this elusive but bracing drama sees guesthouse worker Sooha (Bella Kim) drive French writer Yan (Roschdy Zem) out to the demilitarised zone just north of the South Korean city of Sokcho. Metaphor alert: Koya Kamura’s debut film also camps in a no man’s land of the soul, with Sooha, abandoned by her French father while she was still in utero, caught between two cultures. After the francophone hostess is forced to chaperone the enigmatic author, she loiters uncomfortably between tetchy friendship and Oedipal attraction.When she’s not digging into spectacular-looking seafood prepared by her fishmonger mother (Park Mi-hyeon), Sooha is lolling about with her boyfriend (Gong Do-yu), an aspiring model gunning for a move to Seoul. But this comfy routine is overturned when the foreigner settles in for a long-term stay. Initially conforming to her prejudices about rude French men, he turns out, on Googling him, to be critically lauded graphic novelist Yan Kerrand. Coming to Sokcho in search of inspiration, he manages to prise the story of Sooha’s absent parent from her. She spies on him through a vent – but it remains to be seen whether he’s a proxy father, or something else. Continue reading...

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