General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

In Another Country

In Another Country (다른 나라에서, Da-reun na-ra-e-seo) is a 2012 South Korean drama film written and directed by Hong Sang-soo, in which Isabelle Huppert plays three different French women named Anne who visit the same seaside resort town in separate, overlapping stories¹^•². It was Hong's first English-language film and premiered in the official competition at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival³^•⁴.

Key fact	Detail
Director and writer	Hong Sang-soo¹
Premiere	Official competition, Festival de Cannes, first public screening May 21, 2012⁴
South Korean release	May 31, 2012; 30,784 admissions¹^•⁵
Runtime	88 minutes per the Korean Film Council database; 89 minutes per Cineuropa and Kino Lorber¹^•²
Lead cast	Isabelle Huppert (Anne), Yu Jun-sang (lifeguard), Jung Yu-mi (Won-joo)¹
Production	Jeonwonsa Film Co. (South Korea) with Les Films du Camélia (France); producer Kim Kyoung-hee²
U.S. release	Kino Lorber, limited theatrical release November 9, 2012; gross of $22.1K⁶^•⁷
Critical scores	83% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (30 reviews); Metascore 69 from 13 critic reviews⁷^•⁸

Spoilers

Premise and structure

The film opens with a frame story. A young film student, Won-joo (Jung Yu-mi), and her mother Park Sook (Youn Yuh-jung) flee mounting debt to Mohang, a seaside town, where the daughter writes scripts for a short film to calm her nerves¹^•⁹. Three women named Anne then appear, each visiting Mohang in turn¹:

The first Anne is a successful film director visiting her Korean friend Jong-soo (Kwon Hae-hyo)¹^•¹⁰.
The second Anne is a married woman secretly having an affair with a Korean man¹.
The third Anne is a divorcée whose husband left her for a Korean woman; in this version she seeks guidance from a monk¹^•¹¹.

Each Anne stays at the small hotel by the Mohang shore owned by Won-joo's parents, receives help from the owner's daughter, and meets the lifeguard (Yu Jun-sang) who wanders the nearby beach¹. The three stories echo one another through repeated events and characters: Anne asks the lifeguard for directions to a lighthouse in one story and joins a young woman on a shopping trip in another, while a man and his pregnant wife (Kwon Hae-hyo and Moon So-ri) and the filmmaker lover (Moon Sung-keun) recur in shifting configurations¹²^•¹³.

Production and language

A first for the director. The film was Hong Sang-soo's first English-language production, with Huppert speaking English throughout³^•¹⁰. It was a France–South Korea co-production between Les Films du Camélia and Jeonwonsa Film, produced by Kim Kyoung-hee, with cinematography by Park Hong-yeol and Jee Yune-jeong and editing by Hahm Sung-won². The English singer and actress Jane Birkin appears in a cameo at the beginning of the film¹⁴. Huppert, an admirer of Hong's work, agreed to the project before knowing what it would be about, saying she said yes because she loves his films¹⁵.

Release and reception

The film premiered in competition at Cannes on May 21, 2012, and opened in South Korea on May 31, 2012, drawing 30,784 admissions⁴^•⁵. Kino Lorber acquired U.S. rights at the festival; CEO Richard Lorber called it a breakthrough film for the director, and the company released it theatrically in the United States on November 9, 2012, where it grossed $22.1K⁶^•⁷.

Critical response was favorable but divided on the film's weight. On Rotten Tomatoes it holds an 83% Tomatometer from 30 reviews, with a critics consensus praising its intelligent observations and Huppert's presence, while the audience score stands at 48%⁷. Metacritic assigned a Metascore of 69 based on 13 reviews, in the "generally favorable" range⁸. Korean critics on Cine21 gave it an expert score of 7.80 and an audience score of 7.65⁵.

Reviewers frequently noted the film's lightness. Peter Bradshaw, film critic for The Guardian, called it "a transnational doodle of a film" that is "slight, diverting, forgettable"¹¹. Sheri Linden of the Los Angeles Times described it as "a beguiling set of variations on a theme" composed for delight rather than dissection¹⁶. Nick Schager, writing in Film Comment, argued that Huppert's performance, remaking the same situations with slightly different notes, was what made the film occasionally sparkle¹².

Place in Hong's career

The film marked a shift toward more consistently transnational production in Hong's economically modest filmmaking, and it began a series of collaborations with Huppert, who later played a photographer wandering Cannes in his Claire's Camera (2017)¹⁰^•¹⁷. The Korean Film Archive's Cinematheque program notes describe it as the start of one of the most fruitful actor-director collaborations in contemporary cinema, and as a study in variations in which uncanny differences and strange echoes accumulate across the three stories¹³. Commentators have also read its nested structure, three scripts written within the frame story, as an arrangement of multiple story worlds whose hierarchy the film deliberately complicates¹⁸.

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Comedy and romantic films (individual works) › Comedies of 2011 to 2012 › Released in 2012

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

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