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Hit the Night + Q&A
6 Nov 2018
Hit the Night, Dir. Jeong Ga-young, South Korea, 2017, 85 mins, Korean with English subtitles
Under the pretext of carrying out research for her new scenario, director Ga-young plays the lead in Hit the Night as a filmmaker, and interviews a man she’s been wanting to get to know. Asking him to consider her a friend, she begins to draw out details of his sexual fantasies and relationship status, and her real intentions for the meeting slowly become clear.
Set in a bar, where time is marked by glasses of gin, Hit the Night is a feminist exploration of attraction, challenging the ‘rules’ and expectations of heteronormative desire, while also raising very current questions about the blurring of professional and personal boundaries. With hints of The Before Trilogy by Richard Linklater, this film is driven by dialogue that lasts all evening, meandering through intellectual and sexual topics, personality traits and childhood memories. A self-reflexive thread about films and the filmmaking process adds a postmodern flourish.
This screening coincides with the 2018 London Korean Film Festival and is followed by a Q&A with the director hosted by film programmer and writer Sophie Brown.
Jeong Ga-young is a filmmaker from South Korea. Following the selection of her final graduation project Change of the Season (2017) for screening in the 19th SEOUL International Women’s Film Festival (SIWFF) Asian Short Film & Video Competition, Hit the Night is her latest film. This film’s world premiere was at the 22nd Busan International Film Festival in 2017, where it won Actor of the Year Award for Park Jong-hwan and Vision-Director's Award for Ga-Young. It screened at International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) in 2018.
