General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Hill of Freedom (자유의 언덕)

Hill of Freedom (자유의 언덕, Jayu-ui eondeok) is a 2014 South Korean romantic comedy-drama directed and written by Hong Sang-soo, his sixteenth feature film, in which a Japanese man's search for a Korean woman he loves is told through a bundle of undated letters that have been accidentally shuffled out of order.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director / writer	Hong Sang-soo, his 16th feature¹
Release	September 4, 2014, South Korea; adults-only rating³
Running time	66 minutes per KOFIC; 67 minutes per Cine21 and Yonhap²^•³
Cast	Ryo Kase (Mori), Moon So-ri (Youngsun), Seo Young-hwa (Kwon), Kim Eui-sung, Youn Yuh-jung²
Language	Dialogue mostly in English, with Korean and Japanese⁴
Festivals	Venice Orizzonti competition (2014), Toronto, New York⁵
Awards	Golden Montgolfier at the Festival des 3 Continents (2014); Best Film from the Korean Association of Film Critics (2014)⁶^•⁷
Box office	39,828 admissions on 46 screens, gross $238,102 (KOFIC)²

Spoilers

Plot and structure

Kwon (Seo Young-hwa), a language school instructor who had to give up her daily life due to illness, returns to Seoul after convalescing in the mountains and stops by her old workplace, where a thick envelope of letters is waiting for her.⁸ Two years earlier, Mori (Ryo Kase), a Japanese instructor at the school, had proposed marriage to her; she asked for time to think and turned him down the next day, and he returned to Japan immediately.⁸ He is now back in Korea looking for her.⁸

The scrambled letters. After reading the first letter in the lobby, Kwon grows faint coming down the staircase and drops the letters, which are undated, so she has no way of knowing the order in which they were written.⁸ The film's narrative, which consists of the events the letters relate, then unfolds in this haphazard order.⁶ The Busan International Film Festival's program note describes the effect: the familiar principle of cause and effect becomes tangled, creating what it calls the magic of time that can only be realized in Hong's works.⁹

Mori's two weeks in Seoul. Mori stays at a guesthouse in the Bukchon neighborhood where Kwon lived, leaves a note on her door, and hears nothing from her for nearly two weeks.¹⁰ He passes the time between a Japanese-style café named Hill of Freedom and the guesthouse courtyard, befriending Youngsun (Moon So-ri), who runs the café, after rescuing her dog, and drinking often with Sangwon (Kim Eui-sung), the intrusive nephew of the guesthouse owner (Youn Yuh-jung).⁶^•⁹^•¹⁰ Yonhap's review describes Mori as an ordinary man who carries books about time yet answers rudeness with rudeness when drunk, and notes that the film ends with a fairy-tale-like coda in which Mori takes Kwon's hand on a hillside path.¹⁰

Language and performance

Mori and his Korean acquaintances speak English to each other almost exclusively, with varying fluency and little self-consciousness; Mori does not know Korean.⁴^•¹¹ The Japan Times critic Mark Schilling, a longtime reviewer of Japanese cinema, wrote that Kase gives nuanced readings to the baldest of lines in his slightly fractured English.⁴ Moon So-ri said in an interview that she and Kase acted their English scenes at her own real level of English rather than pretending not to know the language.¹²

Production

The film was produced by Jeonwonsa Film Co., with Kim Chohee as producer and Hong Sang-soo as executive producer, and sold internationally by Finecut.² Shooting ran from June 22 to July 9, 2013.¹³ Kase, who had long been a fan of Hong's films, met him as an interviewer during a 2012 or 2013 press visit to Japan; after the interview the two smoked in the corridor and agreed to work together, and this became Kase's first appearance in a Korean film.¹⁴^•¹⁵ Kase described Hong's on-set method in an interview: the director writes each day's script the morning of shooting and says "Let's see what happen" before each take.¹^•¹⁶

Release and reception

The film premiered in the Orizzonti competition at the 71st Venice International Film Festival and was also invited to the Masters section of the Toronto International Film Festival and the main section of the New York Film Festival.⁵^•¹⁷ It was the only Korean film in a competition section at Venice that year.¹⁸ At the Festival des 3 Continents in Nantes it won the Golden Montgolfier (Montgolfière d'Or) in 2014, and the award helped make its name in France, where Cahiers du Cinéma, Première, and Libération reviewed it favorably.⁶^•¹⁹ In November 2014 the Korean Association of Film Critics named it Best Film at its 34th annual awards.⁷

Box office. It opened on September 4, 2014 on 45 screens with 1,933 admissions on the first day, the highest opening score that year for a Korean independent film released on fewer than 50 screens and the highest opening-day figure for a Hong film since Jeonwonsa built its own production and distribution system.⁵ KOFIC records total admissions of 39,828 and a gross of $238,102 on 46 screens; Cine21 lists 38,772 admissions.²^•³ In the third quarter of 2014 it ranked tenth among films in Korea with about 34,000 admissions.²⁰

Critical response. Richard Brody of The New Yorker called it a "slender masterwork" in which Hong achieves a complexity akin to the grand historical meditations of Alain Resnais.²¹ On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds an 86% Tomatometer from 21 reviews.²² The film has continued to circulate in retrospectives, including the Nantes festival's 2020 selection and a Hong Sangsoo retrospective at the Korean Film Archive.²^•²³

Place in Hong Sang-soo's work

At 66 minutes, Hill of Freedom was, at the time of release, the shortest of Hong's features.²⁴ Critics read it as a departure in degree rather than kind: the director who usually favors fairly taut narrative structures here works in a mode of consistent fluctuation, with changing languages, temporal discontinuity, and uncertainty about the relationships' trajectories.¹¹ The film also offers two different endings that could serve as the close of Mori's story, one happy with Kwon and one unsatisfying with Youngsun.¹¹ A scholarly study has examined how Mori's voice-over narration gives the film's world a dream-like quality, producing what the author calls a distinctive (non)reality.²⁵

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026