Hong Sang-soo’s ‘By the Stream’ Set for North America Release

“By the Stream” (aka “Suyoocheon”), the latest work by prolific South Korean minimalist director Hong Sang-soo, is set to release in North American theaters next year.

Rights were acquired by Brooklyn-based distributor Cinema Guild from sales agent, Seoul, Korea-based Finecut. Both companies have handled many of the director’s previous works.

The picture will have its world premiere in competition this month at the Locarno Film Festival. It will subsequently play at the New York Film Festival and other festival berths are expected to be announced in the coming weeks.

Hong is known for his micro-budget, minimalist drama films that are long on conversation, chance encounters and female protagonists. He also likes to work with a tight-knit circle of actors.

The new film is Hong’s 32nd as director. It takes him back to the campus setting of films like “Oki’s Movie” from 2010 and “Our Sunhi” from 2013. A press kit made available by Locarno describes the story as turning on a lecturer at a woman’s university who asks her uncle, a blacklisted actor-director, to direct a skit at the university.

A longer synopsis provided by Cinema Guild adds more: “In the wake of a scandal involving several of her students, Jeonim (portrayed by Kim Minhee), an artist and lecturer at a women’s university, asks her uncle Chu Sieon (Kwon Haehyo) to step in and direct a short play for the skit festival put on by her department. Her uncle is an actor-director, recently blacklisted after a scandal of his own. He decides to direct the short play because of a similar experience directing a play at the same university 40 years earlier. It doesn’t take long before Sieon develops feelings for Jeonim’s colleague, Professor Jeong (Cho Yunhee), a textile professor. Meanwhile, the circumstances surrounding the scandal grow more complicated, the moon waxes in the sky each night, and every morning Jeonim goes to the stream and sketches to grasp its patterns,” it reads.

“’By the Stream’ is Hong’s longest film in years,” said Cinema Guild President Peter Kelly, “But he packs so much into two hours—the colors, the compositions, the pileup of narrative possibilities—that we didn’t want it to end.”

In addition, Cinema Guild also announced the acquisition of two earlier films from Hong, “Right Now, Wrong Then” from 2015 and “In Another Country” from 2012. Cinema Guild now holds rights to 24 of Hong’s 32 films and all but one of the films he’s made since 2008.

Hong’s early 2024 film “A Traveler’s Needs,” an elliptical tale about a French teacher in Seoul, won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Award or second prize at the Berlin Film Festival in February this year.

Last year, Hong’s “In Water” played in Berlin’s Encounters section. That followed three successive years in which Hong has appeared in Berlin’s main competition, with: “The Woman Who Ran,” which earned Berlin’s Silver Bear for best director; 2021 title “Introduction” which won another Silver Bear, for best screenplay, at that year’s delayed festival; and “The Novelist’s Film” which won a Grand Jury Prize in 2022.

Hong’s 2018 effort “Hotel by the River” previously played in Locarno.