HYPERTEXT WONDERLAND

In 2014, South Korea adopted a number of big changes to taxation laws. It meant price hikes of many everyday goods. Contrary to media narrative, such things affect both old and young - especially in cities like Seoul where already high costs of substantially impact disposable income. Personally I wasn’t aware of this until I watched Jeon Go-woon’s Microhabitat . As an outsider, Korea has always struck me as a prosperous and easy country to live in. The film though illustrates a darker side to the country. It describes a situation in which people have to choose between what they regard as basic pleasures and necessary luxuries. This is especially prescient for the main character, who deems rent to such be an in-affordable part of her life that she chooses to ditch the pleasure of permanent accommodation to go apartment-hopping around several of her old college band-mates. Along the way, she discovers the decisions they've each made to achieve what they deem to be a good life....

Ethnography and film have a lot in common with each other. Documentaries follow the act of observing real world phenomena. They present real-life moments back to us in edited form. Watching them we almost become like researchers ourselves, meticulously drawing attention to the minutiae of events or things or characters or people or cats as they happen. In my opinion the best documentaries don’t demand that we agree with their world. It's a viewpoint shared by New-York based filmmaker Kazuhiro Soda . His latest film Inland Sea  aired recently on MUBI, and I'm happy to report that it's an excellent piece of cinema verite - important in presenting a different side to Japan than what we're usually afforded to in popular media. The film depicts an ageing fishing community, Ushimado - a favourite setting of legendary Japanese filmmaker Shohei Imamura. It follows the town's citizens as they live lives determined by the tradition of catching and selling fish - a ...

When a director makes enough movies, you tend to notice a number of recurring traits. Terrance Malick for instance likes to include a lot of shots of nature. Yasujiro Ozu enjoys framing shots with characters standing in doorways. Quentin Tarantino enjoys characters swearing at one another, a lot. If South Korean filmmaker Hong Sang Soo has a shtick it’s paradoxically that nothing happens. His prolific rate of films – 18 in the past ten years! – is guided by his tendency to draw towards the unremarkable qualities of life. He often makes movies that are extremely ordinary but by being extremely ordinary succeed in getting to the heart of characters and their interpersonal dilemmas. His 2013 film  Nobody’s Daughter Haewon follows this line of thinking. It’s about a young, beautiful – even for Korean standards – student at a crucial point in her personal development. She’s struggling because she's dating a film professor, a man much older than she - a relationship complicate...