General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Power of Kangwon Province (강원도의 힘)

The Power of Kangwon Province (강원도의 힘, Gang-wondo-ui him) is a 1998 South Korean drama film written and directed by Hong Sang-soo, his second feature, in which two former lovers travel separately from Seoul to the resort province of Kangwon during the same weekend without ever meeting.¹^•² It was invited to the Un Certain Regard section of the 1998 Cannes Film Festival, where it received a Special Mention, and it won Best Director and Best Screenplay at the 1998 Blue Dragon Awards.³^•¹

Key fact	Detail
Director and writer	Hong Sang-soo, his second feature after The Day a Pig Fell into the Well (1996)¹
Release	April 4, 1998, South Korea; drama, 108 minutes, 35mm color, adults-only rating⁴^•⁵
Principal cast	Baek Jong-hak (Sangkwon), Oh Yun-hong (Jisook), Kim Yu-seok (the policeman)⁴
Cannes 1998	Invited to Un Certain Regard; Special Mention³
Korean awards	Blue Dragon Awards 1998: Best Director and Best Screenplay; Grand Bell Awards 1999: cinematography¹
Box office	KOFIC records 275 admissions on one screen ($1,486 gross); Cine21 records 16,230 admissions¹^•⁴
Critical standing	100% Tomatometer (8 reviews) and 82% Popcornmeter on Rotten Tomatoes⁶

Spoilers

Plot and structure

The film follows Jisook (Oh Yun-hong), a college student recovering from a breakup with Sangkwon (Baek Jong-hak), a married university lecturer who hopes to become a professor. After their separation, each takes a trip to Kangwon Province, a popular holiday region near Seoul: Jisook with two friends, Sangkwon with a younger colleague.⁵^•⁴

In the first part, Jisook and her friends travel to Gangneung by night train, visit the Seorak mountain area, and meet a policeman who guides them to lodging. After a drinking quarrel in which her friends reproach her affair with the married Sangkwon, the drunken Jisook spends the night with the policeman at a guard post; she later returns to Kangwon alone to see him.⁷ During the trip she also learns of a woman who fell from a mountain, an event no one witnessed and whose cause, accident or murder, is left unclear.⁷

The second part restarts the story from Sangkwon's perspective, covering the period before his trip and his journey to the same places at the same time. The two former lovers never meet during the holiday, though the film places them in the same spaces, on the same train, and near the same events.² After Sangkwon becomes a professor, the two meet again.⁴

The two halves are designed to be read as one chronology. The film scholar Marshall Deutelbaum, professor emeritus at Old Dominion University, shows that Hong signals the coincidence of the two trips by repeating the opening shot of Jisook in the train's passenger car when Sangkwon's journey begins, so that viewers experience the two strands as widely separated while they occur in the same diegetic time (time within the film's story world itself).² The Rotterdam festival program described the design as telling the story twice, with the second part readable as an alternative or a deeper version of the first.⁵

Style and themes

Hong wrote the screenplay himself, as he would for all his subsequent films, and the film marks the consolidation of his method: scenes filmed mostly in static single takes, editing by straight cuts, and a cool, observational camera.⁸ Compared with his debut, the composition is more dynamic, mixing two-shot conversations with landscapes and striking set-ups, and the men are less violent and less pathetic than those of the first film.⁸

The film's subject is everyday life observed without consolation. The Cannes festival described it as precisely capturing the daily lives of people living in Korean society at the end of the 1990s.⁹ The Rotterdam program read it as being about loneliness, about people's difficulty maintaining relationships, and about the way people keep making the same mistakes, told without moralizing.⁵ Recurring motifs bind the two halves: the former lovers visit the same places at different times, and a pair of goldfish Sangkwon keeps in his office is reduced to one after the failed reunion.⁸

Reception and place in Hong's career

The Cannes invitation in 1998 marked the start of Hong's long relationship with the festival; Korean accounts describe The Power of Kangwon Province as the beginning of Korean cinema's serious engagement with Cannes, and the Special Mention brought Hong international attention that led to his appointment as a screenwriting professor at the Korea National University of Arts.³^•¹⁰ In the same year, Lee Kwang-mo's Spring in My Hometown was invited to Directors' Fortnight.³

Domestic reception was divided. Cine21's retrospective note records that opinion split into pro and con camps over the film, while agreeing that Hong's work occupies a unique position in Korean cinema.⁴ A 1998 survey of the 50 best Korean films placed it 45th.¹¹ Later critics returned to it warmly: Richard Brody of The New Yorker called it a coolly bracing drama of the mysterious bonds of lovers with an original form to match, and Manohla Dargis of The New York Times praised Hong as a master of ellipsis who keeps the two leads at such a remove that the stories initially seem unconnected.⁶

The film's commercial run was small. KOFIC's database records 275 total admissions on a single screen and $1,486 in gross receipts, while Cine21 lists 16,230 admissions.¹^•⁴

Later circulation

The film has remained in circulation through retrospectives and home video. It screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 1999, appeared in Hong retrospectives at Karlovy Vary (2000), Thessaloniki (2002), Las Palmas (2004), CAAMFest (2007), Deauville (2011), BAFICI (2013), the London Korean Film Festival (2018), and the Beijing International Film Festival (2020), and was programmed in the Korean Classic Film channel's online screening in 2025.⁵^•¹^•¹² A restored Blu-ray was released in 2021 by Grasshopper Film.¹³ Within Hong's filmography it stands between the violent debut The Day a Pig Fell into the Well and the more austere Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (2000), and it established the two-part, repeated-story structure he would continue to develop.¹⁴^•²

References

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