General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

A Traveler's Needs (여행자의 필요)

A Traveler's Needs (여행자의 필요, Yeohaengjaui pilyo) is a 2024 South Korean comedy-drama written, directed, photographed, edited, and scored by Hong Sang-soo, starring Isabelle Huppert as Iris, a French woman adrift in Seoul who supports herself by teaching French through an unorthodox method of her own invention. The film premiered in the Competition section of the 74th Berlin International Film Festival and won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize.¹^•² It was Hong's 31st feature and his third collaboration with Huppert, after In Another Country (2012) and Claire's Camera (2017).³^•⁴

Key fact	Detail
Director and crew	Hong Sang-soo served as director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer, editor, and music director; Kim Min-hee was line producer¹
Cast	Isabelle Huppert, Lee Hye-young, Kwon Hae-hyo, Cho Yunhee, Ha Seongguk, Kim Seungyun, Kang Soyi, Ha Jinhwa²
Award	Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize, 74th Berlin International Film Festival (2024)²
Running time and rating	90 minutes; rated 12 in South Korea¹
Languages	Korean, French, and English⁵
Korean release	April 24, 2024; 8,723 admissions and $57,275 gross on 56 screens¹
US release	November 22, 2024, limited, distributed by The Cinema Guild⁴

Spoilers

Plot

Iris, a woman who claims to be from France, sits on a park bench playing a child's recorder when the film opens. With no money or means of supporting herself, she has been advised to teach French, and she takes on two Korean women as pupils.² Her method is idiosyncratic: she asks students to share their personal feelings about events in their lives, then translates those feelings into handwritten French notes and audiotapes, which the students memorize. She believes language is easier to learn when the study material is personal rather than drawn from textbooks.⁶

The film follows a series of encounters. Iris first works with Isong (Kim Seungyun), a shy young woman whose polite answers about her piano playing gradually give way to an admission that feelings of inadequacy weigh on her as she plays.⁶ She then joins Wonju (Lee Hye-young), a woman skeptical of the teaching method, and Wonju's husband (Kwon Hae-hyo) in conversations about languages, work, and their daughter.⁷ Iris lives with Inguk (Ha Seongguk), a gentle young man captivated by her free spirit, whose mother (Cho Yunhee) arrives unannounced and questions her son's attachment to the older woman.⁷

Recurring motifs frame the story. Iris likes to walk barefoot, lie down on rocks, and try to see each instant in a non-verbal way, and she relies on makgeolli, the milky Korean rice wine, for a bit of daily comfort.² By the end she distills what she has gathered into poetic notes.⁸

Style and themes

The film carries the trademarks of Hong's recent work: static camerawork, slow zooms, domestic settings, and wandering conversations.⁹ Reviewers identified language as the central subject, including the intent behind words and what gets lost in translation.⁷ Slant's critic Chuck Bowen, a film critic whose work has appeared in The Guardian and The Atlantic, described the premise of crossing a language barrier through personal memories as poignant, and credited Hong's long-take scenes, in which slips of the tongue lead to personal revelations, while judging the film unusually uneven by his standards.⁶ On Rotten Tomatoes the film held an 80% Tomatometer from 41 reviews, with a critics consensus calling it languid and subtle in form.⁴

A structural habit noted by critics is repetition: the same dialogue reappears in different scenes with changing characters, a device one review described as another of Hong's triplets.¹⁰ Le Monde reported that Hong distributes dialogue to the actors on the morning of shooting, with no fixed script, and that he replays the same lines in two different scenes to disorient the viewer before drawing them back in.¹¹

Production

The film was produced by Jeonwonsa Film Co., with international sales by Finecut Co., Ltd.¹ The production was minimal even by Hong's standards. In a 2026 interview, Huppert said that for A Traveler's Needs the crew was practically just Hong and a sound recordist: he did the framing with a very small camera and the lighting himself, there were no multiple versions of the script because there was no script, and all three films she made with him in that period were shot in less than 10 days.¹²

Release and reception

After its Berlin premiere in February 2024, the film circulated widely on the festival circuit, with invitations including the Hong Kong International Film Festival (The Masters), the Beijing International Film Festival (DIMENSION), the Melbourne International Film Festival (Asia Pacific), the Busan International Film Festival (Icon), the BFI London Film Festival, and the San Sebastián Film Festival's Perlak section, among others.¹^•⁵

Commercial returns were modest. In South Korea it earned 8,723 admissions and $57,275 on 56 screens.¹ In Spain, released as La Viajera on April 16, 2025 by Atalante Cinema, it sold 7,426 admissions for €46,312.43.¹³ In Japan it opened on November 1, 2025 as the first release in a five-month series of new Hong films marking the director's 30th debut anniversary.¹⁴

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 2023 and 2024 › Titles O to Y

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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