General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Our Sunhi (우리 선희)

Our Sunhi (우리 선희; also romanized U ri Sunhi) is a 2013 South Korean drama film written, directed, and produced by Hong Sang-soo, in which a film-school graduate's request for a recommendation letter sets off a chain of encounters with three men from her past who each try to define her. It premiered in the international competition of the 66th Locarno Film Festival, where Hong won the award for Best Director, and was released in South Korea on September 12, 2013.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director and writer	Hong Sang-soo (born 1960); his 15th feature¹^•³
Release	September 12, 2013 (South Korea); 88 minutes; drama; adults-only rating¹
Principal cast	Jung Yu-mi (Sunhi), Lee Sun-kyun (Mun-su), Kim Sang-joong (Professor Choi), Jung Jae-young (Jae-hak)⁴
Major award	Best Director (Silver Leopard), 66th Locarno International Film Festival, 2013; the first Locarno directing award for a Korean director²
Box office	69,155 admissions and $393,082 gross in South Korea¹
Production	Jeonwonsa Film Co.; producer Kim Kyoung-hee; cinematography Park Hong-yeol; editing Hahm Sung-won; music Jeong Yong-jin¹^•⁴
Shooting	Shot in six days on HD video⁵^•⁶

Spoilers

Plot

Sunhi (Jung Yu-mi), a film major who graduated a year or two earlier, returns to her school to ask her professor, Choi (Kim Sang-joong), for a letter of recommendation to study in the United States. Knowing the professor favors her, she expects a good letter. Leaving campus she runs into Mun-su (Lee Sun-kyun), her ex-boyfriend and a newly debuted film director, and the next day into Jae-hak (Jung Jae-young), an older senior director from the same film school.¹^•⁴

Through successive meetings over four days, Sunhi and the three men offer each other "advice on life" with good intentions. The men, all strongly interested in her, guess at and try to define her character, describing her in turn as creative, reserved, smart, odd, and artistic, without being able to tell how she really feels. Strangely, their advice and descriptions of her are similar and seem to pass from one person to the next, while their thoughts on Sunhi grow increasingly irrelevant to her.¹^•⁷ In the end Sunhi receives an excellent letter of recommendation from Professor Choi and is satisfied with its praise, wishing the words are true.¹

The film's Korean title carries a possessive meaning, and the critic Charlotte Garson, writing for the Festival des 3 Continents, notes that the trio of men who lend the title its possessive are given a "fine lesson" in letting go on the heights of Changgyeonggung Palace.⁵

Style and production

Long takes and drinking scenes. The film consists largely of conversations over food and alcohol, filmed in unbroken long takes punctuated by sharp zooms. The drinking-table scenes linking Mun-su and Sunhi, Mun-su and Jae-hak, Jae-hak and Sunhi, Jae-hak and Professor Choi, and Professor Choi and Sunhi total 25 of the film's 88 minutes, all shot in long takes.⁸ Jung Yu-mi said she drank considerably while filming these scenes, trusting the director and senior actors and performing what was given to her.⁸

Hong does not distribute a full script in advance; dialogue is written on set each day, which he has said lets the film capture the day's mood, weather, and the actors' condition. The entire film was shot in six days, and Jung Yu-mi appeared on only four of the shooting days.⁸ The film was shot on HD video in a 1.85:1 aspect ratio.⁶

Recurring collaborators. Jung Yu-mi had by then appeared in six of Hong's films, from shorts such as Jeongjungsan (2009) and List (2011) to features including Like You Know It All (2008), Oki's Movie (2010), and In Another Country (2011), which is why she has been called his muse. It was her third film with Lee Sun-kyun and her first with Kim Sang-joong and Jung Jae-young.⁸

Release and reception

Locarno. Our Sunhi premiered at the 66th Locarno International Film Festival in August 2013 in the international competition, where 13 films competed. Hong won the festival's Best Director award, the Pardo d'Argento, which the festival treats as its second prize behind the Golden Leopard for best film, won that year by Albert Serra's Story of My Life. Hong was the first Korean director to receive the Locarno directing award.²^•⁹ The production company Jeonwonsa reported that at its screening the film was called the most beautiful of that year's entries.²

Domestic release. Released in South Korea on September 12, 2013, the film passed 10,000 admissions nationwide in three days, with a cumulative 13,125 admissions by September 15; Jeonwonsa stated this was the fastest such mark among Hong's films it had self-distributed. It held a top-ten box office position for four consecutive days despite playing on 36 screens against Chuseok-holiday blockbusters.³ It finished with 69,155 admissions and a gross of $393,082.¹

Festival circuit and awards. After Locarno and Toronto, the film traveled widely through 2013 and 2014, including programs at the Vancouver, Vienna, Stockholm, London, Mar del Plata, Dubai-listed Nantes Three Continents, San Francisco, Seattle, Melbourne, and Munich festivals, among others, and a Hong retrospective slot at Gijon.¹^•¹⁰ At the 2013 Busan Film Critics Association Awards it received the Best Actress prize and the Special Jury Prize, the latter citing Hong's concise, clean imagery and story.¹¹

Critical view. Reviewers placed the film within Hong's established manner. Time Out described a retro, 1970s feel in its orange and gray tones and academic discussions of identity.⁷ The Harvard Film Archive's note called it a "crisp Rohmerian entry" into Hong's work and "a playful study of male ego," in which the three men project their own feelings onto an obscure and unwitting object of desire.¹² The film holds an 82 percent score on the Tomatometer as listed on Google Play.¹³

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 2013 to 2014 › Titles J to W

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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