The Asian Film Archive presents Twin Tales, a special programme featuring six pairings of films by French New Wave director Éric Rohmer and prolific Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo. Both directors craft intimate, deceptively simple, philosophical worlds from the mundanity of everyday life, navigating moral quandaries through meandering walks, long, awkward dinners, chance encounters, and mistaken identities. Their characters, often artists, filmmakers, writers, or solitary middle-class figures, grapple with fragile egos, desire, indecision, social propriety, and the fictions they conjure in the pursuit of meaning and connection.
Whether set against the seasonal rhythms of France or the winter landscapes of Seoul, these flâneur-like figures drift through urban spaces with an understated humour and emotional ambiguity. The films’ use of situational irony and playful structures often undergird their protagonists’ repetitive behavioural patterns and gestures, hinting at a deeper cosmic circularity in life’s rhythms.
This programme explores Rohmer’s notable and widely acclaimed works as an entry point into his oeuvre, alongside Hong’s lesser-known (but no less foundational) early films. Twin Tales invites audiences to reflect on the affinities and divergences between Rohmer’s wry moral tales and Hong’s elliptical, minimalist, and self-reflexive portraits. Together, their films offer a cinema where inner worlds of language, ethics, and desire collide with the fleeting nature of existence.
Twin Tales: Éric Rohmer and Hong Sang-soo runs from 5 – 27 July 2025 at Oldham Theatre.
There will be a post-screening online Q&A session with Éric Rohmer’s longtime editor Mary Stephen after the 20 July screening of Conte d’été (“A Summer’s Tale”).
Full programme details and to purchase tickets HERE