# Tale of Cinema (극장전)
**Tale of Cinema** (극장전, *Geuk jang jeon*) is a 2005 South Korean drama film directed by [Hong Sang-soo](https://www.edgepedia.org/hong-sang-soo), built around a film-within-a-film and a two-part structure that blurs the boundary between fiction and reality. It stars Kim Sang-kyung, Uhm Ji-won, and Lee Ki-woo, runs 89 minutes, and screened in [Competition](https://www.edgepedia.org/competition) at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival.[1](https://eng.koreafilm.or.kr/movie/PM_010431) • [2](https://www.koreanfilm.or.kr/eng/films/index/filmsView.jsp?movieCd=20050106)
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Director, year, runtime | Hong Sang-soo, 2005, 89 minutes, 35mm[1](https://eng.koreafilm.or.kr/movie/PM_010431) |
| Cast | Kim Sang-kyung (Kim Dong-soo), Uhm Ji-won (Choi Young-sil / Young-shil), Lee Ki-woo (Jeon Sang-won)[1](https://eng.koreafilm.or.kr/movie/PM_010431) • [3](https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/tale-of-cinema) |
| Structure | Two independent narratives: the film-within-the-film *Theatre Story*, and the story of Dong-soo, who believes that film was based on his own experiences[1](https://eng.koreafilm.or.kr/movie/PM_010431) |
| Festivals | In Competition at Cannes 2005; Golden Tiger Award nominee at the 2005 Rotterdam International Film Festival[2](https://www.koreanfilm.or.kr/eng/films/index/filmsView.jsp?movieCd=20050106) • [4](https://www.cinematheque.co.kr/cinema/20050106) |
| Production | mk2 films, ARTE France Cinéma, Jeonwonsa, Happinet Pictures; co-produced by Marin Karmitz[5](https://cineuropa.org/en/film/132547/) |
| Firsts in Hong's career | His first self-produced film, and his first use of the zoom and voice-over[6](https://chajournal.com/2024/08/11/tale-of-cinema/) |
| U.S. release history | Played festivals and special series but never had a proper U.S. theatrical release before Metrograph's virtual cinema in 2021[7](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/tale-of-cinema-reviewed-a-crucial-hong-sang-soo-film-finally-reaches-theatres) |
## Spoilers
### Structure and story
The film is divided into two parts. Part 1 is presented as a short film titled *Theatre Story*, ostensibly the work of a director whom viewers do not properly meet until Part 2. In it, Sang-won, a nineteen-year-old, artistically minded high school student, sees a play for the first time in his life and runs into his first love, Young-shil, a former classmate who has dropped out of high school and works in her uncle's optician shop. After a night of heavy drinking in a seedy hotel, Sang-won suggests a suicide pact and Young-shil agrees. The film follows the mundane preparations that follow, gathering pills, buying soju and dried squid, looking for a pack of Marlboros, getting a notebook for last words, and fretting about the hotel bill. The pact fails: Young-shil leaves and sends Sang-won's family to rescue him.[1](https://eng.koreafilm.or.kr/movie/PM_010431) • [7](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/tale-of-cinema-reviewed-a-crucial-hong-sang-soo-film-finally-reaches-theatres) • [8](https://inreviewonline.com/2018/10/18/tale-of-cinema/)
Part 2 shifts to the reality outside *Theatre Story*. Dong-soo, a man in his thirties who has long been preparing his directorial debut, watches the short film, directed by a seriously ill senior colleague. [Coming out](https://www.edgepedia.org/coming-out) of the screening, he meets Choi Young-sil, the actress who played Young-shil, asks for her contact information, and persistently confesses his love to her. Later the same day, a restaurant gathering honors Yi Hyongsu, the elder director who was Dong-soo's mentor and gave Young-shil her start, and who is hospitalized with a possibly fatal illness; the party of movie professionals and film-school students becomes, in Richard Brody's description, a stew of envy, contempt, and resentment.[1](https://eng.koreafilm.or.kr/movie/PM_010431) • [7](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/tale-of-cinema-reviewed-a-crucial-hong-sang-soo-film-finally-reaches-theatres)
The Korean title carries a double meaning: *Theatre Story* is both a "story about the theater" (劇場傳) and a "story that unfolds in front of the theater" (劇場前). Against this backdrop, the movie probes both the dividing line separating its two fictional strands and the line dividing fiction from reality, because Dong-soo is convinced that the film he has just watched drew on his own life.[1](https://eng.koreafilm.or.kr/movie/PM_010431) The narrative offers no signposts; only midway through does the film map its own landscape, distinguishing authentic settings from staged ones.[7](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/tale-of-cinema-reviewed-a-crucial-hong-sang-soo-film-finally-reaches-theatres)
## Place in Hong Sang-soo's career
Hong Sang-soo, born in 1960, began directing in 1996, and Tale of Cinema was his sixth feature, released in 2005 when he was forty-five.[7](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/tale-of-cinema-reviewed-a-crucial-hong-sang-soo-film-finally-reaches-theatres) The film marks several turning points. It was his first self-produced film, and it introduced two devices previously absent from his work, the zoom and the voice-over, both of which he continued to deploy, often in counterintuitive ways. It is also his last film with an explicit sex scene, a window into his evolving attitudes toward gender relations.[6](https://chajournal.com/2024/08/11/tale-of-cinema/) Critics have noted the insistent reliance on the zoom in particular, a technique often thought slovenly, alongside the first use of voice-over.[9](https://mubi.com/en/films/tale-of-cinema/critics-reviews)
In its themes, the film carries forward an idea from Hong's previous films, namely that no one viewpoint can be complete, and turns it into a critique of moviemaking as yet another artificial construct that selects and distorts.[10](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17400309.2013.862606) It was the first of his films to blur fictive and "real" timelines, and it belongs to the class of Hong films that migrate from one plane of reality to another through a story within a story, a mise en abyme (story-within-a-story mirroring the larger work itself).[11](https://theseventhart.org/process-and-poetics-in-hong-sang-soos-recent-work/) • [12](https://www.filmcomment.com/tale-of-cinema-dennis-lim-excerpt/) Richard Brody, writing in [The New Yorker](https://www.edgepedia.org/the-new-yorker), reads the film as dramatizing cultural transmission and the battle between the generations, with Hong positioned between the frustrations of youth and the exhaustion of middle age; the film's self-deprecating melancholy about lost youth would become a linchpin of his subsequent practice.[7](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/tale-of-cinema-reviewed-a-crucial-hong-sang-soo-film-finally-reaches-theatres)
The production was international. It was made by Jeonwonsa with mk2 films, ARTE France Cinéma, and Happinet Pictures, with the French producer Marin Karmitz among its producers, and it received backing from the Centre National de la Cinématographie.[5](https://cineuropa.org/en/film/132547/)
## Reception and legacy
Critics received the film as a meditation on the relationship between reality and representation. Jonathan Romney wrote that it "morphs halfway through into a meditation on cinema, love and reality" and called it the work of a director who makes no compromises in elaborating an entirely individual style.[9](https://mubi.com/en/films/tale-of-cinema/critics-reviews) Ed Gonzalez argued that the film-within-a-film does not provoke Tong-su to imitate its story so much as it opens the floodgates of memory.[9](https://mubi.com/en/films/tale-of-cinema/critics-reviews) Chengzhi Jin observed that in Dong-soo viewers can see their own relationship with cinema, and the difficulty of escaping the situation that traps him.[8](https://inreviewonline.com/2018/10/18/tale-of-cinema/)
Despite its festival circulation, the film reached U.S. audiences slowly: it played festivals and special series but had no proper U.S. theatrical release until Metrograph's virtual cinema in May 2021.[7](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/tale-of-cinema-reviewed-a-crucial-hong-sang-soo-film-finally-reaches-theatres) It is now available for streaming and digital rental in the United States.[3](https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/tale-of-cinema)
The film's standing grew with Hong's later career. Dennis Lim, a writer and curator, published *Tale of Cinema* in 2022, a pocket-sized book-length essay in Fireflies Press's Decadent Editions series that uses the 2005 film as a through-line to survey Hong's cinematic universe, with chapters on self-financing, the zoom, narration, sex, death and hotels, and gender relations.[6](https://chajournal.com/2024/08/11/tale-of-cinema/) Lim opens the book by quoting [Roland Barthes](https://www.edgepedia.org/roland-barthes)'s 1975 essay "Leaving the Movie Theatre," reading Hong's film as enacting that liminal space in which both the characters and the viewers of the film have been thrown into new surroundings.[13](https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2023/book-reviews/dennis-lims-tale-of-cinema-a-meta-monograph/) Later Hong films have looked back to it: *Oki's Movie* revisits *A Tale of Cinema* in its self-reflexive examination of filmmaking and storytelling.[14](https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2016/great-directors/hong-sang-soo/)
## References
1. [Tale of Cinema, Korean Film Archive Cinematheque programme](https://eng.koreafilm.or.kr/movie/PM_010431)
2. [Tale of Cinema (2005), Korean Film Council (KOFIC)](https://www.koreanfilm.or.kr/eng/films/index/filmsView.jsp?movieCd=20050106)
3. [Tale of Cinema streaming, JustWatch](https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/tale-of-cinema)
4. [극장전 (Tale of Cinema), Cinematheque (Korean)](https://www.cinematheque.co.kr/cinema/20050106)
5. [Tale of Cinema (Geuk jang jeon), Cineuropa](https://cineuropa.org/en/film/132547/)
6. [Nirris Nagendrarajah, review of Dennis Lim's Tale of Cinema, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal](https://chajournal.com/2024/08/11/tale-of-cinema/)
7. [Richard Brody, "Tale of Cinema, Reviewed: A Crucial Hong Sang-soo Film Finally Reaches Theatres," The New Yorker, May 24, 2021](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/tale-of-cinema-reviewed-a-crucial-hong-sang-soo-film-finally-reaches-theatres)
8. [Chengzhi Jin, "Tale of Cinema, Hong Sang-soo," In Review Online, October 18, 2018](https://inreviewonline.com/2018/10/18/tale-of-cinema/)
9. [Tale of Cinema (2005) critic reviews, MUBI](https://mubi.com/en/films/tale-of-cinema/critics-reviews)
10. [Davis and Maloney, "Hong Sang-soo's Geuk-jang-jeon [A Tale of Cinema]: redaction criticism and production analysis," New Review of Film and Television Studies 12.1 (2014)](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17400309.2013.862606)
11. [Process and Poetics in Hong Sang-soo's Recent Work, The Seventh Art](https://theseventhart.org/process-and-poetics-in-hong-sang-soos-recent-work/)
12. [Dennis Lim, "An Act as Simple as Dreaming," Film Comment, May 2, 2022](https://www.filmcomment.com/tale-of-cinema-dennis-lim-excerpt/)
13. [Dennis Lim's Tale of Cinema: A Meta-Monograph, Senses of Cinema, 2023](https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2023/book-reviews/dennis-lims-tale-of-cinema-a-meta-monograph/)
14. [Hong Sang-soo, Great Directors, Senses of Cinema, 2016](https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2016/great-directors/hong-sang-soo/)
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*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 2000s › Biographical and historical drama films 2000s › Released 2000 to 2005*
*Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*
*Copyright 2026 EdgeChat AI, a subsidiary of Biostate AI.*
License: Edgepedia Community License 1.0, https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license