Film

After failing his university entrance exams for the third year in a row, Min Suk (Kwangmin Lee), a directionless twenty-something Korean man, travels to New York to visit his long-distance girlfriend Yeon Jae (Woohyun Kim). Over the course of a rollercoaster week, he experiences both the thrill of losing himself in a new city and the bitter realization that his relationship is gradually imploding. A romantic, outsider’s view of New York shot in elegiac black and white, Sunrise/Sunset perfectly captures the wonder and disorientation that comes with being a stranger adrift in a strange land.

Reeling from a recent breakup, American expat Andrew Hevia headed to Hong Kong where he intended to make a documentary about the contemporary art fair Art Basel. What he ended up with instead is something far funnier, rawer, and more woundingly personal than a mere art world exposé. As nearly everything relating to the project goes awry, Hevia finds himself alone and adrift in the glimmering, skyscraper-and-shopping mall wonderland of Hong Kong, turning the camera on his own bewilderment, loneliness, and fear of failure. An at once wryly humorous and emotionally naked record of alienation in the age of globalization, Leave The Bus Through The Broken Window turns an artist’s personal crisis into a brilliantly meta self-portrait.