General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Like You Know It All (잘 알지도 못하면서)

Like You Know It All (잘 알지도 못하면서; revised romanization Jal Aljido Mothamyeonseo) is a 2009 South Korean comedy-drama film written and directed by Hong Sang-soo, his ninth feature, about an art-house film director's drunken misadventures as a festival juror and guest lecturer.¹^•² It premiered in the Directors' Fortnight section of the 2009 Cannes Film Festival and was released in South Korea on May 14, 2009.³

Key fact	Detail
Director and writer	Hong Sang-soo, his ninth feature²
Release	May 14, 2009, South Korea; 126 minutes; rated teenagers prohibited (19)¹^•⁴
Production	Jeonwonsa Film; budget about $100,000¹
Cast	Kim Tae-woo (Ku Kyeong-nam), Go Hyun-jung (Go-sun), Uhm Ji-won (Hyeon-hee), with Kong Hyung-jin, Ha Jung-woo, Jung Yu-mi, and Yoo Joon-sang¹
Pay conditions	All actors performed without guaranteed salaries¹
Box office	39,984 admissions on 30 screens in South Korea; about $208,867 worldwide³
Festival premiere	Directors' Fortnight, 2009 Cannes Film Festival³

Spoilers

Story and structure

The film follows Ku Kyeong-nam (Kim Tae-woo), an art-film director whose work earns critical respect and festival awards but little public success. He travels to Jecheon to serve on the jury of the Jecheon International Music & Film Festival, where he spends more time drinking with filmmakers than watching the films he is meant to judge. After a night of heavy drinking at the house of an old friend, he leaves town accused of something he cannot remember doing. Weeks later he goes to Jeju Island to lecture at a film school, where he meets a celebrated painter who was his college senior and discovers that the painter's new wife is Go-sun (Go Hyun-jung), the woman he loved in his twenties.¹^•³

The Korean Film Archive describes the film as an episodic tale-of-two-halves structure, moving from jury duty at the Jecheon festival to university lectures on Jeju, and notes that it was Hong's second feature shot digitally.⁵ The Busan International Film Festival's program note calls it Hong's variation on difference and repetition, arising from the comings and goings between the film festival and Jeju Island.⁶ Screen Daily's Cannes review observed that the two halves mirror each other: in each, an attractive younger woman approaches Ku, a kudos-seeking porn starlet in the first part and a flirtatious young film student in the second, and in each she ends up in bed with an artistic rival of the director's, a fellow director in the first part and a respected older painter in the second.²

Production

Hong made the film independently on a micro budget, a practice the BFI marks as beginning with this picture, when he switched to micro-budget independent production for greater flexibility.⁷ The budget was about $100,000, and the cast, which included established stars such as Go Hyun-jung and Ha Jung-woo, worked without guaranteed salaries.¹ Korean press reported that the actors joined the project voluntarily out of a desire to work with Hong.⁸ Before release, the Korean rating board classified the film as teenagers prohibited (19), citing sexual explicitness, profanity, and theme unsuitability.⁴

Reception and place in Hong's career

Critics received the film as a relaxed, funny entry in Hong's filmography. Screen Daily called it an elliptical, meandering but often quietly hilarious tale, noting that while Hong attempted nothing particularly new in his ninth feature, rarely had it all come together so smoothly, and judging it his funniest film in years.² The Harvard Film Archive's note, quoted by the Korean Film Archive, describes the film as consistently and effortlessly hilarious, taking stabs at the cult of infallible artistic genius and at the absurdity of artistic creation itself.⁵ On Rotten Tomatoes the film held a Tomatometer of 48 percent from two reviews at the time of the site's crawl.⁹

Commercially the film stayed small, as Hong's films generally do in Korea. It sold 39,984 admissions on 30 screens, grossing about $208,867 worldwide against its roughly $100,000 budget.³ Screen Daily noted that Hong's previous film, Night and Day, had failed to break the $100,000 barrier, and that recouping the modest budget would depend on territories such as France, where Hong is a cult favorite.²

The film also marks a turning point in Hong's body of work. The BFI places it at the start of his micro-budget independent period, within which his fixation with male insecurity evolved into a curiosity about the quandaries of the opposite sex.⁷ Senses of Cinema identifies the art-cinema director Ku as the first character who seems very close to a Hong surrogate, and reads the film as a satire on the world of film festivals and university lectures that Hong knows well.¹⁰ The Independent Cinema Office notes that from The Turning Gate onward Hong worked from a broad outline, writing scenes day to day, and that his male leads, including those played by Kim Tae-woo, often seem like surrogates for the director himself, though the films remain fictions rather than autobiography.¹¹

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 2009 to 2010 › Released in 2009

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

Notice something wrong?