09/09/2024 - French-Japanese director Koya Kamura delivers an sensitive, intimate, and atmospheric first feature film about the road to self-acceptance

The fugu, also known as the puffer fish, is toxic and deadly, unless you master the culinary art of how to cook it, and the same could be said of the nebulous secrets which sometimes hang over our existence and from which we have to be careful how we free ourselves if we truly wish to find out who we are. This is the subject of the beautiful, understated and melancholy movie Winter in Sokcho [+see also:
trailer
interview: Koya Kamura
film profile], Koya Kamura’s debut feature film which was unveiled in competition at the 49th Toronto Film Festival and which is set to continue its journey in the New Directors line-up of the 72nd San Sebastian Film Festival. It’s a delicate and charming film, showcasing the many directorial qualities of this French-Japanese director, who shot the movie in South Korea and who has deftly orchestrated the coming together of newcomer Bella Kim and star Roschdy Zem.

"Hello Miss France". Soo-Ha (Bella Kim) works in a small hotel called the Blue House in the snowy, seaside town of Sokcho. Having returned to her hometown several months earlier, the former literature student is now on the verge of a married future (as desired by her mother) with her boyfriend, Jun-Oh, who wants to be a model in Seoul. But Soo-Haa is concealing inner torments linking back to her birth and to a French father she’s never met.

When Yan Kerrand (an excellent Roschdy Zem in the rather unusual role of a French comic book author who "likes going to really busy places but only when they’re deserted") arrives in the hotel, a deep malaise stirs within the young 25-year-old woman. Little by little, the two loners grow closer to one another, visiting the surrounding area, talking about their scars and secretly observing one another…

Based upon Élisa Shua Dusapin’s book of the same name and very cleverly composed by Koya Kamura and Stéphane Ly-Cuong, the screenplay homes in on the various stages of their encounter, which sits on the border of communication between two different cultures and two characters who struggle to let their guard down, each of them lost in their own separate ways and with Kerrand holding up a mirror to Soo-Ha’s liberating search for self. Absorbing the atmosphere of the (varied and highly evocative) natural setting like a sponge, the film gently advances towards the heart of its subject-matter with great sensitivity, displaying an unobtrusively sophisticated visual approach, complemented by short animated sequences (courtesy of Agnès Patron). We might almost speak of old-fashioned cinema (in the positive sense of the term) when we speak of this first feature film which plays elegantly on "forms, lines and structures", which allows its style to infuse rather than imposing it by force, and which ultimately reveals a director we all should be watching very closely.

Winter in Sokcho was produced by French firm Offshore in co-production with Korean outfit Keystone Films. Be For Films are steering international sales.

(Translated from French)