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, Claire’s 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.

Claire’s 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, Hong’s 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 Manhee’s 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 Hong’s 2017 output, it is still just as innovative and masterful.

Description courtesy of Ryan Swen