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A Summer Tale
(Cuento de Verano)

Director – Matías Szulanski – 2025 – Argentina – 78m

*****

A moneylender’s difficulties getting money owed back from clients on time cause his heart to play up – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

It’s a lovely Summer day. Jorge (Fabián Arenillas) is out on the street, getting up again, gathering his briefcase. What happened? A blackout? A heart attack? 

The camera follows him from behind as he enters a modern building. In the hairdresser’s, the owner asks him to come back later as he’s busy with a client. A cigarette on the go, stopping for a glass of Coke, he makes his next call. When the door opens, it’s the client’s son, who turns out not to have nearly enough money to make a significant payment. 

He returns to the hairdresser’s, where one of the customers heaps abuse on him. If what he had at the start was a heart attack, it’s not hard to see why. Jorge leads a highly stressful life. 

Wherever he goes, he seems to want to extract money from people. A phone call to Diana (Tamara Leschner) leads to a quick meeting where he picks up $124 000 and gives her an invoice.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Silver Apricot
(Eunbitsalgu,
서울독립영화제)

Director – Jang Man-min – 2024 – South Korea – Cert. 12 – 121m

***1/2

A Seoul woman in need of funds to buy a condo returns to her childhood coastal town to get the alimony payments her estranged father never stumped up – from LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival 2025 which runs in cinemas from Wednesday, November 5th to Tuesday, November 18th

Tormented by dreams set at night in which sometimes she herself and sometimes people she knows are vampires preying on others, which inspires her to draw a webtoon series, 32-year-old Kim Jung-seo (Na Ae-jin) has moved to Seoul and bought into the corporate dream, agreeing to split the cost of a condo, the right to buy for which she won on a lottery, with her fiancé Park Gyeong-hyun (Kang Bong-seong).

The only problem is, she has just been refused a permanent position at the graphic design company which employs her, so doesn’t have the money. So she resolves to visit her estranged father and pick up the alimony he never paid her mother Choi Mi-yeong (Park Hyun-sook) after their divorce. Jung-seo regularly visits the latter, who also lives in Seoul, whereas it’s been years since she was in the coastal town where her father lives with his new family.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Hot In Day,
Cold At Night
(Naj-eneun Ddeobgo
Bam-eneun Chubgo,
낮에는 덥고 밤에는 춥고)

Director – Park Song-yeol – 2020 – South Korea – Cert. 12 – 90m

**

A young, unemployed, married Seoul couple struggle to make ends meet from LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival which runs in cinemas from Thursday, November 3rd to Thursday, November 17th

Married Seoul couple Young-tae and Jeong-hee (played by screenwriters Park Song-yeol and Won Hyung-ra) are in financial trouble. Neither of them has a secure job with a regular income. They aren’t the only ones: he lends his mate Myung-su the family camera for a week so the latter can do some professional wedding photography to earn some money. If this sounds a bit odd, it sounds odder still when Young-tae finds his calls blocked and can’t get the camera back.

Desperate for money, Young-tae goes for interviews and, after a row with an old friend who purports to be setting up a business but turns out trying to recruit him for a network marketing operation, which Young-tae dismisses as a pyramid scheme, he eventually picks up a job as a cabbie where one night he gets into a row with a customer over taking a quicker, toll road rather than a slower, free road and loses his deposit with the company.… Read the rest