Review of Winter in Sokcho / Hiver à Sokcho, directed by Koya Kamura

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

When it comes to blogging, or even watching movies and whatnot, I’ve been in such a weird headspace lately. I started a new job after quite a bit of a spell of not having any besides freelance and contract work, and now that I am actually working, I’m not watching as much as I used.

Part of it is fueled by my newfound YouTube addiction, but part of it just is that I can’t stay awake long enough to get everything I want done. I haven’t even been going to the movies lately to see them in-person because I simply am just tired after I get everything else done.

Call this a regular phase of corporate America and adulting, but I want to find a balance and go back more to the things I love. Sometimes life is simply trying to find a balance between the things that keep you alive, providing food, shelter, and warmth, and the things that you actually want to spend your life enjoying.

I was in the middle of a trip when I found out that MUBI had added access for US customers to Winter in Sokcho. Many years back I had read the book version of this story and thought that it was okay. I own a copy of the book, but I wasn’t deeply impressed by it when I read it.

But when I saw it was adapted for the big screen and on MUBI, I used my seven day free trial just to watch it. I also watched The History of Sound and Oh, Moon! but I wasn’t able to get to anything else before it expired. I like MUBI’s curation, but I can’t justify the price of it on top of everything else I pay for in my daily life.

Let’s get into the review! I don’t want to ramble too much in the introduction.

A French-Korean girl bonds with a French stranger and artist who’s come to Sokcho in search of inspiration.

This movie I would describe as one of those slice-of-life that has deeper philosophical meanings to its poetry. Our main character is Soo-ha, who lives with her mother in the tourist town of Sokcho. It’s a beautiful town by the ocean, and it’s quite popular with local Koreans. Her mother works in the local fish markets, while Soo-ha has a job at a local inn catering towards tourists.

In addition to working at the inn, we see Soo-ha with her boyfriend Joon-oh. I think from the beginning we get the sense that her relationship with Joon-oh is uneven, as she seems to be disintered with actually being with him romantically. He talks of moving to Seoul, while Soo-ha has different thoughts.

It’s while Soo-ha is working at the inn does she encounter a new long-term resident: a French artist named Yan Kerrand. He’s quite well-known in his own home country for his work, but as Soo-ha tries to talk to him, she connects with her own past. She speaks French, which is odd that she speaks quite well for someone not seemingly French, but then we see that she actually has French ancestry through her father.

Soo-ha is expected to work as a translator for the innkeeper and Yan, but he’s a tough cookie to crack at first. He stays in his small room and occasionally goes to the convenience store, but as we see throughout the movie, it’s through Soo-ha that she’s going to crack his hard exterior.

Much like how she feels like an outsider in her own world at times, desperately looking to connect with her French side while stuck in a small Korean town, Yan is someone who is actively an actual outsider coming into a culture she’s familiar with. While she straddles both worlds, he struggles with chopsticks and has no idea how to eat Korean food, let alone a seafood stew that has the whole fish.

And that’s the beauty of this movie—there’s a bit of an implication of a romantic relationship between the two, or at least a crush developing within Soo-ha with a man old enough to be her father, but it’s really about the journey of these two becoming more comfortabl with each other and getting to a certain level of openess.

It’s also a beautiful movie to watch. I admired the cinematography very much, and found myself pausing some scenes and finding myself in awe of what I was seeing on screen.

Overall Thoughts

I really enjoyed this movie, which was surprising to me. I thought the book was okay overall, which is why I came in with lower expectations in the beginning. But when I was getting into the groove of this movie I thought it actually translated well into film as a medium, which made me wonder if the translation of the book was clunkier than I thought.

Regardless, I thought this was a fairly universal movie for some, despite it being set in Sokcho. Sokcho is an engine that drives the events of the movie, and very much remains in the background. Whether it’s the fish market or the cold, relentless sea in the middle of winter, I thought that this movie did a great job of showing life beyond this tourist town.

All of this is to say I enjoyed this a lot, and if you get the chance to see it and are interested, then go for it! I think this is a solid weekend watch—or something you could watch when you want to contemplate life late at night without a care in the world for the job you have to go to the next day.

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