A couple of coincidences we came across during the making of Winter’s Night

1.
It was my first day at the Muju Film Festival in 2017, where I was invited with Autumn, Autumn. While waiting for the Q&A session with the audience to start, I was chatting with actor Yang Heungjoo under a wisteria tree by the field. I mentioned that I’d like my next film to take place in the winter at Cheongpyeongsa; because I didn’t have any specific story in mind, we asked how each other was doing.

“How is your wife doing these days?”
“She’s the same. She teaches acting part-time and prepares for a play as well.”

At that moment, an idea came to me. In Autumn, Autumn, the character Heungju visited Cheongpyeongsa with a woman other than his wife. What if he visits the same place with his wife? That was how Winter’s Night came to take shape.

2.
We were shooting the scene where Heungju searches for Eunju, who disappeared post-argument in front of Cheongpyeongsa after misplacing her phone. Here, Heungju looks for Eunju on a street that splits in three directions. It was late at night, so the street-side stores were closed. When Heungju fails to find Eunju, he gets frustrated and exhausted and flops. After catching his breath, he goes off again up a street. But during this scene, the actor did not know he took off his mittens and left them behind. Once he exited the frame, we could only see the mittens he had left behind. When he heard me say “cut,” actor Heungju returned to grab the mittens. This incident created a new kind of story by chance.

Eunju is someone who knows precisely what she lost, 
while Heungju is roaming around without even realizing what he lost.
This is their winter night.

3.
We were shooting a scene where Eunju walks through a still snowy path towards a forest. I asked actor Seo Younghwa to keep walking until she was offscreen, and her character Eunju disappeared into the woods. A bit after the scene ended, Younghwa took her time to enjoy the view while coming back down. Eunju was restless all this time, but she seemed to enjoy this break in solitude. The cinematographer and I decided to continue recording to capture the moment, and that’s how our last scene was created. JANG Woojin

A Fresh Start (2014), Autumn, Autumn (2016), The First Lap (2017, Producer)

Midwinter Night’s Dream
The pink-and-blue-streaked dark of a neon-lit night and the otherworldly still of an icy winter conspire, in Jang Woojin’s third feature, to strand a middle-aged couple in both space and time. The existential scaffolding of Winter’s Night reveals itself only gradually; the film opens as a deceptively breezy comedy of manners. On their way back from a visit to an island temple in Chuncheon, Eunju and Heungju discover that Eunju’s phone is missing. Distraught, she insists that they head back, no matter the late hour and the arduous trip involving a ferry; Heungju follows, his exasperation barely veiled. As they retrace their steps in a craggy, desolate snowscape, simmering with the quiet discontent of a long-term couple, they cross paths with a younger duo—a soldier and a poet—in the coy flush of an incipient romance.

Sly tricks of editing, flecked with déjà vu, turn the shape of this meeting of two couples into the central mystery of Winter’s Night. Are we watching the intersection of two distinct lives that are fatefully, coincidentally, mirrored? Or is this a time loop, a conjoining of the past and present? An unmistakable heir to the talky, recursive dramas of Hong Sangsoo, Winter’s Night itself bears a whiff of déjà vu, a sense of new, poetic life breathed into an old template. As the characters pour out their hearts in karaoke bars and beside frozen lakes, over cups of soup and bottles of soju, the film’s riddles of form give way to a deeper, more universal enigma: whether two people can grow so familiar that they become strangers to one another. Devika GIRISH

Production Bomnae Films (bomnae.films@gmail.com)
Distribution INDIESTORY (indiestory@indiestory.com)
International Sales M-Line Distribution (sales@mline-distribution.com)

2018 Festival des 3 Continents Prix du Jury Jeune (Winner)

2018 SIFF Feature Competition (Nominee)

2018 PÖFF Best Director·Best Actress (Winner)

2021 Wildflower Film Awards Korea Best Narrative Director (Nominee)