The Brooklyn Rail

In Hong Sang-soo’s films, characters never get tired of talking. Often fueled by soju and makgeolli, they declare their feelings towards one another, lash out, and ruminate on everything from dating and career troubles to the nature of time and the illusion of causality. Curiously, politics has been missing from Hong’s dialogues, but in his thirty-second feature, By the Stream (2024), it is front and center. Weaving biographical details of leading man Kwon Hae-hyo’s life in activism into its narrative, the film reckons with South Korea’s thorny history of state censorship and gender politics. Of course, all art is political, and Hong’s oeuvre is no exception—but By the Stream truly stands out as his most saliently political work to date.

By the Stream opens with a shot of Jeonim (Kim Min-hee, who also line-produced), a textile artist and university lecturer, working on a watercolor piece near a stream by the entrance of a women’s college where she works. Soon, she is joined by her uncle Sieon (Kwon), a former actor-director who now manages a bookstore in a coastal city three hours from Seoul by car. Amid a recent scandal involving her students who were putting together a short play for a school skit festival, she has asked her uncle to step in and replace a male director who instigated the chaos. Although they have not seen each other for ten years, Sieon agrees to help out for old times' sake: forty years earlier, he directed a skit at the same university.

Jeonim introduces him to her department head Jeong (Cho Yun-hee, Kwon’s real-life spouse), a huge fan of Sieon. Jeong expresses her admiration for his political courage, which put him on a blacklist and eventually drove him to leave his acting career behind—a detail mirrored by Kwon’s having been blacklisted by the conservative government led by Lee Myung-bak. Meanwhile, the original director (Ha Seong-guk) returns to campus to plead his innocence and reinstate the production, only to be told off by Jeonim who is further outraged by his audacity. As it turns out, the disgraced man romantically pursued some of the students from the play. Later that night in the campus courtyard, Jeonim runs into three young women who dropped out of the production when the scandal came to the surface. They gather around a tiny lamp and share an empowering moment of solidarity. Lit only by the dim LED light in the middle of the night, their faces are barely visible in the frame. Yet, the faintness of the image underscores their refusal to be engulfed by darkness. Jeonim holds their hands and whispers, “Be at peace.”

Jeonim’s words of consolation later rhyme with a remarkable post-festival drinking scene. The celebratory mood is in tension with the controversial reception of the play for its perceived “political” nature. Sieon spontaneously asks four student actors to improvise spoken poems on the subject of what kind of people they hope to be. Teary-eyed and under the influence of soju and post-performance relief, they take turns articulating simple but earnest wishes in life with piercing confessionalism: becoming someone who can give themself up to others, living a day filled with true love, ceaselessly moving forward until finding a life path that speaks to oneself, and living life with pride. Hong’s usual observational detachment is replaced by resounding affirmation for his characters, with every one of his signature zooms brimming with attentiveness. Deeply moved by the four women’s candid poems, Sieon—and by extension, Hong, who operated the camera—expresses his gratitude for their courageous display of vulnerability. This moment of overwhelming sincerity and affection for the characters is easily one of the most profound scenes in all of Hong’s filmography.

The scene’s emotional pull partly derives from the parallels between Sieon and Kwon’s personal history. A seasoned actor with over one-hundred credits under his belt, Kwon is also famous for his left-wing activism, particularly in South Korea’s decolonization and feminist spaces. He has consistently attended protests demanding reparations from the Japanese government for their colonial atrocities, and worked as an official ambassador for Korea Women's Association United, an umbrella entity made up of more than thirty women’s rights organizations in the country. He has never shied away from voicing his political convictions, even if it meant getting his name on a blacklist put together by the state, much like Sieon. When Sieon reminisces about his experience directing a skit at the same school forty years prior and apologizes to the students about all the trouble caused by the play, it is hard to resist reading this moment as Kwon addressing the young women: that he is truly sorry that, despite all he has done, the world remains a hostile place for women, and something as simple as “living life with pride” requires hefty sacrifice.

Towards the end of the film it is revealed that Sieon and Jeonim’s family have been estranged for so long because of his political activities. At a family function ten years ago, Jeonim’s mother called him a “commie”—a label that once meant complete social death and, in worse cases, torture sessions administered by the police at the height of anti-communist campaigns in South Korea. To protect his dignity, Sieon cut ties with his sister. But here he is, ten years on, sitting across from his niece who respects him deeply. Sieon finds himself reflecting on his artistic legacy and family history while mentoring a new generation of artists who will soon shape the future. Two currents of history crisscross throughout By the Stream: the rehashing of the past marked by political struggles and reconnecting with the unfolding present lived by younger generations. Likewise, Jeonim’s art pieces, entitled “Flowing Water, Han” and “Flowing Water, Jungrang” respectively, go against the current of the water and geographically move toward the upper reaches of the Han River, concluding at a to-be-made piece, “Flowing Water, Suyoo,” named after the waterway by the campus.

Interestingly, “Suyoocheon”—the Korean title of the film—is not a real river. The waterway seen in By the Stream is Uicheon River, which still geographically aligns with the conceptual direction of Jeonim’s art series. Hong has not clarified what “Suyoocheon” means, but judging from the film’s narrative, “follow where the river flows” (隨流川) sounds like a close guess. In the final scene, Jeonim disappears briefly to explore what lies further upstream. When she returns, she reports back: “There’s nothing.” Perhaps by the end of the film, both Sieon and Jeonim have freed themselves from their pasts, now prepared to give themselves up to the current.

Deviating from the autofiction that Hong is most renowned for, By the Stream taps into Kwon’s valiant life to create a rich tapestry of South Korea’s turbulent history of anti-communism, media censorship, and intergenerational reconciliation. At the same time, it is a heartfelt tribute to the actor whom the director is lucky to call a friend. Ever since the news of their extramarital relationship came to the surface in 2016, Hong and Kim Min-hee have faced intense media scrutiny and become something of personae non gratae in many circles. His movies perform very poorly at the domestic box office these days, and Kim has stopped working with other filmmakers. Many of Hong’s longtime collaborators have since moved on, but Kwon, along with a few others, stood by their side. Although it may not be as formally sophisticated as some of his past works, like The Day After (2017), The Day He Arrives (2011), and Tale of Cinema (2005), By the Stream has radiance and warmth that are new to his cinema. It is the kind of radiance and warmth that comes when a director designs a whole movie as a tribute to their favorite actor: Jean Renoir for Jean Gabin in French Cancan (1954) or Tsai Ming-liang for Lee Kang-sheng in, well, all of their films together.