** Winner of the Best Screenplay award at Berlin Film Festival! **

Youngho (Shin Seokho) goes to see his father who is tending to a famous patient. He surprises his girlfriend, Juwon (Park Miso), in Berlin where she is studying fashion design. He goes to a seaside hotel to meet his mother and brings his friend Jeongsoo (Ha Seongguk) with him. In each instance, he anticipates an important conversation. But sometimes a shared look, or a shared smoke, can mean as much as anything we could say to those close to us.

For his twenty-fifth feature as director and his first as cinematographer, Hong Sangsoo offers a simple tale of young people on the edge of adulthood. Introduction cuts to the essence of who we are as people, like an unexpected hug on a winter’s day.

(Hong Sangsoo, South Korea, 2021, 66 min, in Korean with English subtitles)
Stills and synopsis courtesy of Cinema Guild.

“Lucid and elusive. A point of entry into Hong’s sprawling and addictive body of work… In the midst of everything else, some of us crave a glass of soju and a stroll on an icy beach where the forecast is for romantic disaffection and wary politeness punctuated by sudden squalls of feeling. It’s a taste worth acquiring.” – A.O. Scott, The New York Times

“Hong isn’t a minimalist but a tip-of-the-iceberg-ist…Introduction’s clarity and simplicity—and the outrageous, nearly humorous audacity with which its brisk mysteries conjure wide-ranging, complex, and turbulent stories—makes it among Hong’s most compulsively rewatchable films.” – Richard Brody, The New Yorker

“Scintillating… Radically casual… As bracing as a brief dip in a freezing sea after a rather too soju-soaked luncheon.” – Jessica Kiang, Variety