Nobody's Daughter Haewon

2013 1h 30m KO

👍

6.5

SOLID

★6.5TMDB · 62

Drama

Synopsis

Spoiler shield

Facing her mother’s departure and the weight of a secret affair with her professor, college student Haewon drifts through a series of encounters and dreams, blurring the lines between her desires and reality.

“Some stories are better left unspoiled.”

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Cast

Lee Sun-kyun
Seongjun
Jung Eun-chae
Haewon
Kim Ja-ok
Jinju
Ye Ji-won
Yeonju
Kim Eui-sung
Jungwon
Yu Jun-sang
Jungsik
Ryu Deok-hwan
Dongjoo
Ki Joo-bong
Hoowon

Credits

Behind the camera

Director: Hong Sang-soo
Writers: Hong Sang-soo
Languages: Korean
Countries: South Korea

Want more? Switch to Cinephile mode in the header for DP, composer, budget, box office, production companies, keywords, and release history.

Did you know?

Fun facts 🍿

1 / 8

RUNTIME

Did you know

90 minutes exactly — the "classic feature" runtime most directors aim for.

MoodPlayr · trivia#01

2 / 8

ERA

Did you know

Released 13 years ago.

MoodPlayr · trivia#02

3 / 8

RUNTIME

Did you know

Lean credit list — fewer than 30 people officially credited.

MoodPlayr · trivia#03

4 / 8

DIRECTOR

Did you know

Directed by Hong Sang-soo, shot by Park Hong-yeol. Note their partnership — DPs and directors often return to each other across a career.

MoodPlayr · trivia#04

5 / 8

DIRECTOR

Did you know

Original score by Jeong Yong-jin. Worth a dedicated listen after — most great films lose half their impact without the score.

MoodPlayr · trivia#05

6 / 8

AWARDS

Did you know

Editor Hahm Sung-won shaped the rhythm. On an edit-heavy film, the editor does more to control your pulse than the director.

MoodPlayr · trivia#06

7 / 8

CAST

Did you know

Lee Sun-kyun and Jung Eun-chae and Kim Ja-ok carry the top of the cast.

MoodPlayr · trivia#07

8 / 8

WILD

Did you know

IMDB entry: tt2576522 — still the authoritative cross-reference for credits and trivia.

MoodPlayr · trivia#08

Cinephile deep dive

The take

Hong Sang-soo directs. Park Hong-yeol behind the camera. Jeong Yong-jin scores. Hahm Sung-won cuts. Runs lean at under 100 minutes. Produced in South Korea. Dialogue in Korean.

Trivia

Things worth knowing

190 minutes exactly — the "classic feature" runtime most directors aim for.
2Released 13 years ago.
3Lean credit list — fewer than 30 people officially credited.
4Directed by Hong Sang-soo, shot by Park Hong-yeol. Note their partnership — DPs and directors often return to each other across a career.
5Original score by Jeong Yong-jin. Worth a dedicated listen after — most great films lose half their impact without the score.
6Editor Hahm Sung-won shaped the rhythm. On an edit-heavy film, the editor does more to control your pulse than the director.
7Lee Sun-kyun and Jung Eun-chae and Kim Ja-ok carry the top of the cast.
8IMDB entry: tt2576522 — still the authoritative cross-reference for credits and trivia.
9Only 62 TMDB ratings — you're getting ahead of the curve on this one.
10Released under 10 different titles around the world.

The technical file

Cinematography: Park Hong-yeol
Original score: Jeong Yong-jin
Editing: Hahm Sung-won
Runtime: 90 min · 1h 30m
Status: Released
Original language: KO
IMDB: Nobody's Daughter Haewon (2013)

Also by

Hong Sang-soo

Trailers & featurettes

Watch the pieces

Community reviews

What people are saying

CinemaSerf2024-04-11
★ 6/10
The eponymous girl (Jung Eun-chae) is struggling to come to terms with her mother's imminent emigration to Canada. The day before her departure, the pair meet to spend the day together and when they part, the daughter starts to pine a little. She decides that she wants to meet her former (married) university professor "Seongjun" (Lee Sun-kyun) with whom she'd had clandestine affair and their meeting starts to make both realise what they had, miss and want for their respective - or maybe even conjoined - futures. It's all perfectly watchable but the story is as old as the hills, neither the acting nor the writing really set the thing alight and by midway through I wasn't quite sure whether I cared enough about either of them to worry about the morality of a relationship between a teaching professional and his impressionable student. It's a melodrama-cum-soap opera that does come, slightly, to an head when the couple disclose their former relationship to her friends and to her only other sexual partner but even then, I'm not sure how convinced I was by their responses and attitudes. It's not that I'm being prudish about their sex lives, it's just that I found neither character remotely engaging. The whole premiss might be supposed to be allegorical about the state of Korean nationhood and/or of reconciling their past and the present but it's the sheer banality of the thing that renders it impotent and any development of her troubled, self-obsessed, character is largely left on the sidelines.

Production companies