General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Oki's Movie (옥희의 영화)

Oki's Movie (옥희의 영화; Ok-hui-ui yeonghwa) is a 2010 South Korean comedy-drama written and directed by Hong Sang-soo, his eleventh feature film. It tells a love triangle among a film student, her professor, and a younger filmmaker in four short chapters that shift between time periods and points of view, ending with a short film made by the title character herself.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director / writer	Hong Sang-soo; his 11th feature¹
Release	Premiered September 11, 2010 at the Venice Film Festival; South Korean release September 16, 2010³
Runtime / language	80 minutes, Korean³
Structure	Four chapters: A Day for Incantation, King of Kisses, After the Snowstorm, and Oki's Movie⁴
Principal cast	Lee Sun-kyun (Jingu), Jung Yu-mi (Oki), Moon Sung-keun (Professor Song)¹
Production	Jeonwonsa Film; producer Kim Kyoung-hee⁵
Reception	85% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (13 reviews); 6.8/10 on IMDb⁶^•⁷

Spoilers

Premise and characters

Oki (Jung Yu-mi) is a college student majoring in filmmaking who is preparing her own film project.³ She is caught between two men: Jingu (Lee Sun-kyun), a former student of Song's who is now a struggling short-film director with a habit of drinking too much, and Professor Song (Moon Sung-keun), her much older instructor, a successful director who has had a secret affair with her.⁷^•⁸^•⁹

The film is set around a Korean film school, with its machinations and gossiping, and it assembles the recurring figures of Hong's cinema: film professors and directors, hidden romances, and angry drinking sessions.⁵^•¹

Structure

The film is split into four chapters, each focused on the same three characters but with a slightly different perspective and at a different time.¹ The sections leave out blocks of time and are not presented in chronological order, so the spectator gradually wonders whether one of the characters made the film on screen, or whether the segments were made by separate filmmakers.¹⁰

A Day for Incantation. Filmmaker Jingu goes to a work dinner where he argues with Professor Song, who used to be his professor. He then attends a Q&A for his own short film, where an audience member confronts him about an affair he had.¹
King of Kisses. The story moves back to Jingu's student years. He likes Oki, who has just ended a secret relationship with Professor Song.¹
After the Snowstorm. The three characters gather in a classroom, other students having skipped class because of the weather, and discuss relationships. Jingu and Oki bombard the professor with questions such as "Am I a good person?" and "What do you most want to do in life?"¹^•⁵
Oki's Movie. The final chapter is presented as a short film made by Oki herself, with her own narration, recounting her relationships with a younger and an older man.¹

It is never quite clear whether the four parts show the same characters at different stages of their lives or slight variations on them.¹¹

The final chapter

The last section, which gives the film its title, depicts two separate walks Oki took along the same Mt. Acha path in central Seoul, two years apart, once with Song and once with Jingu.¹¹^•¹ The sequence cuts back and forth between the two walks, comparing each moment as they pass the same locations, down to who went to the bathroom and when.¹ Critics read the side-by-side comparison as an image of how each new attempt at love echoes earlier ones, each relationship built on the memory of a former one.¹¹ Oki's narration states the theme directly: "Things repeat themselves with differences I don't understand."¹

The Cinema Guild's synopsis describes this moving final section as inaugurating Hong's interest in female subjectivity, and the critic Kathy Fennessy wrote that, though the film is not a revenge film in the conventional sense, the way Hong allows Oki to have the last word gives her back the autonomy Jingu attempted to stifle.¹²^•⁶

Style and themes

Hong's familiar materials are all present: soju tables, jealous men, and self-deceiving artists, along with his signature camera zooms and segmented narratives.⁴^•¹¹ The Village Voice review notes that Elgar's "Pomp and Circumstance" recurs as a melancholy theme, alongside the idea that academia and creativity do not mix as well as adjuncts would like.⁹ The soundtrack credit confirms the piece as Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance No. 1 in D major, performed by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.⁷

The International Film Festival Rotterdam program read the film as, apart from a comedy, a plea to regard film as art and to throw overboard restrictions such as having a theme.⁵ Richard Brody, a film critic at The New Yorker, observed that Hong often builds his stories around the life and work of a filmmaker, and that here he takes the premise a step further by presenting a film within a film, ostensibly made by the title character.¹³

Release and reception

Oki's Movie debuted in the Orizzonti section of the Venice International Film Festival in 2010, the first year in which Hong released two films, since Hahaha had won the Un Certain Regard Award at Cannes a few months earlier.¹ It was also an official selection at the New York and Toronto international film festivals.¹² It opened in South Korea on September 16, 2010, sold 37,472 admissions there, and grossed $246,707 worldwide; it received a United States release on April 18, 2012.³^•¹⁴^•⁷

On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes the film holds an 85% Tomatometer score from 13 reviews, with an average of rated reviews of 7.40/10, and a 76% audience Popcornmeter score.⁶ Nicolas Rapold of The New York Times called it a "casually brilliant feat of storytelling, akin to an ingeniously wrought suite of literary short fiction," while Noel Murray of The A.V. Club noted that the film alternates between stretches that seem aimless and self-indulgent and stretches that are sharp, funny, and poetic.⁶ The Korean Film Council's retrospective essay reports that many of Hong's fans rank the film among his best.¹

Jung Yu-mi had appeared in a supporting role in Hong's Like You Know It All (2009) a year earlier; this was the first of her two lead roles for the director, before Our Sunhi (2013), and came just ahead of her breakout in Silenced (2011).¹

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 2010 to 2014 › Romantic and coming-of-age drama films

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

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