With his twelfth feature since 2020 premiering in Locarno's International Competition, Hong Sang-soo keeps proving that the auteur film need not be a rare and expensive event to be a serious one.
Locarno's 79th edition opens on 5 August, and in its International Competition — the severe, unhurried heart of the festival — sits *Nowhere to Lay My Eyes*, Hong Sang-soo's twelfth feature since 2020. Read that number twice. Twelve films in six and a half years, when most auteurs on this circuit are lucky to land three, and the biggest names are courted for a decade between titles. The new one stars Kim Min-hee as a woman who returns, after ten years away, to the mother who settled on Jeju Island; Cinema Guild has already taken it for North America. By every ordinary metric of the festival trade, it is an event that arrives far too often to be treated as one — which is precisely what makes it worth stopping on.
The tempo is the argument
The circuit runs on scarcity. Its whole grammar — the world premiere, the gala slot, the years-in-the-making return — assumes the important film is rare, costly and slow, an occasion the festival exists to consecrate. Hong works against that assumption at every point. His films are made with tiny crews, natural light, improvised dialogue and budgets a single Piazza Grande title would swallow whole; he shoots quickly, edits himself, and premieres somewhere serious almost as fast as he can finish. He has brought a feature to the Berlinale in each of the last seven editions. The economy of scarcity says the auteur film must be an expensive exception. Hong's shelf says it can be a habit — and lose none of its rigour in becoming one.
A director who makes films faster than the circuit can canonise them exposes the festival's founding fiction: that seriousness has to be rare to be real.
That is the awkward gift he hands a festival like Locarno, which has built its identity on loyalty — returning, edition after edition, to the same difficult directors. Hong tests what loyalty actually means. It is easy to stay faithful to an author who delivers a masterwork every five years and lets you frame each arrival as a coronation. It is harder, and more honest, to keep taking seriously a body of work that refuses to space itself out for the calendar, that treats a new film not as a monument but as another entry in a long, patient conversation about the same handful of human embarrassments — drinking, desire, the things people say when they can't say the real thing. To programme Hong in competition is to admit that the twelfth is owed the same attention as the first. On the eve of its 79th edition, Locarno has done exactly that, and quietly conceded the point his career has been making all along: the auteur film was never rare by nature. The circuit just prefers to sell it that way.