Event

Claire's Camera

Fri Apr 13: 7.30pm
Sat Apr 14: 7.30pm
Sun Apr 15: 7.00pm

Hong Sangsoo
France & South Korea
2017
1h 9m

About
The incredibly prolific Hong Sangsoo had something of a breakout year in 2017, premiering three films On the Beach at Night Alone at the Berlin Film Festival, Claires Camera and The Day After at the Cannes Film Festival, with the first and third in competition and garnering acclaim for all three of them. His oeuvre is one of intense prolificacy and consistency, both in filmmaking quality and content. In a career marked by numerous touchstones, he has found seemingly endless ways to develop and experiment with time, structure, and relationships.

Claires Camera, despite its ostensibly unassuming nature, is no different. Shot in a week at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, it follows Manhee (Kim Min-hee, Hongs frequent collaborator), a film sales representative who is fired by her boss for initially unclear reasons. She meets Claire (Isabelle Huppert), a music teacher visiting the festival for the first time, and they strike up a friendship. As they separately interact with Manhees boss and the director she represents, existing and new relationships are teased out of a tangled web, all within a deceptive timeline played with throughout the film. Despite, or perhaps because of, the incredibly short runtime, the film is an immensely complex and rewarding experience. The lightest of Hongs 2017 output, it is still just as innovative and masterful.

Synopsis courtesy of Ryan Swen