Aloners (2023)
Director: Hong Sung-eun Run Time: 91 min. Rating: NR Release Year: 2021
Starring: Gong Seung-yeon, Jeong Da-eun, Kim Hae-na, Kim Mo-beom, Seo Hyun-woo
Country: South Korea
Language: Korean
About the film:
World Premiere, 2021 Jeonju International Film Festival
Official Selection, 2021 Toronto International Film Festival
Jina is the top employee at a credit card company call center. She avoids building close relationships, choosing instead to live and work alone. When she is tasked with training a friendly and naive new hire, her icy armor is threatened. One day, her irritating next-door neighbor is discovered dead in his apartment, several days after he passed away alone. At the same time, she receives increasingly urgent phone calls from her father. Shaken, Jina is forced to confront why she has isolated herself all these years.
In a subtly poetic directorial debut, director Hong Seong-eun riffs on the Korean ‘honjok’ – a phenomenon of young people who live alone and skirt social interaction – to examine the personal traumas of loss and alienation.
About the filmmaker:
Hong Seong-eun is a South Korean film writer and director. She received a B.A. in Business Management and worked at a state-owned company, which she later left to study filmmaking full time at the Korean Academy of Film Arts (KAFA). She graduated from KAFA in 2018 as a directing major. She made her debut with the short film Good Father (2018). Her first feature film Aloners (2020) was invited to compete in the 22nd Jeonju International Film Festival’s Korea Competition section and won the Best Actor Award and the CGV Arthouse Award Distribution Support Prize. The film also screened in the Discovery Section of the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival.
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