Master Hong Sang-soo, the subject of a retrospective at FICX and winner of several awards (the last of which was the Special Jury Prize for In Front of Your Face last year), presents The Novelist's Film, awarded at the last edition of the Berlinale. In this new chapter of his prolific career, Hong resorts to autofiction and black and white to tell the story of a writer in the midst of a creative block. With his usual simplicity, the South Korean director returns to his favourite subject, the intricacies of human relationships, applying depth and drawing meaning, charm and beauty from the most mundane details.
Like Hong Sang-soo, Frenchman Emmanuel Mouret has perfected the difficult art of the romantic comedy (or romanticism with a touch of humour). Two years after his participation in Albar with the acclaimed Love Afair(s), he returns with Diary of a Fleeting Affair. The French director, who has made relationships and emotions the leitmotiv of his filmography, writes splendid dialogues to structure the twenty dates that shape an intense and funny extramarital romance, starring Sandrine Kiberlain and Vincent Macaigne, two outstanding names in current French cinema, whose chemistry works to perfection.
Dissident Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov, arrives at FICX after passing through Cannes with Tchaikovsky's Wife, a formally impeccable melodrama that deals with the homosexuality of the great romantic composer. A film he was unable to shoot a decade ago due to the express prohibition of the Russian government, which kept him under house arrest. As in Leto or Petrov's Flu, Serebrennikov continues to focus on figures of Russian culture, this time through the lense of the wife of the creator of Swan Lake, who never accepted her husband's true sexual orientation and whom the filmmaker accompanies in her fierce opposition to the pressures to divorce him.
The constant dialogue that FICX maintains with filmmakers who have helped shape its identity over the years, along with other experienced voices that have not yet passed through Gijón, is materialised in the Albar competition with the latest films by prestigious directors such as Hong Sang-soo, Emmanuel Mouret and Kirill Serebrennikov.