20 great movies from the past 20 years: Hill of Freedom

I’m counting down to the 2025 best-of-the-year season by recommending 20 of my favorite movies from the past 20 years. Here are the previous entries, if you want to catch up:

2005: Caché
2006: Undisputed II: Last Man Standing
2007: Sunshine
2008: Speed Racer
2009: Vengeance
2010: Unstoppable
2011: The Three Musketeers
2012: Eega
2013: Rope A Dope

The National Museum of Asian Art here in DC regularly hosts free screenings of contemporary and historical Asian films. Before COVID hit, we’d go regularly – the curators do a great job of picking interesting titles, and they’re all free!

The experience introduced us to a lot of filmmakers that we’d otherwise never encountered. Chief among them is the Korean director Hong Sang-soo, a relentlessly prolific filmmaker who tends to make 2-3 movies every year. Getting to see his new releases at that venue was always a treasure.

I’ve seen nine of his dozens of movies – most of them at that museum – and have a fondness for all of them. His work is patient, observational, and full of feeling and great performances. He’s focused on the gestures and micro-expressions that give life to conversation and hint at deeper feelings within everyday dilemmas. Hong also famously doesn’t really write scripts in advance, giving his cast and crew the day’s scene on the morning of the shoot, and encouraging a collaborative and improvisational process on the day.

His movies typically concern domestic dramas, with a recent interest in filmmakers or other artists with authority who have an affair or otherwise fracture a relationship with a younger woman, a clear reflection on his affair with actress and collaborator Kim Min-hee, publicly discovered in 2016. Shockingly, Hong is able to make movies about the topic without coming across as justifying himself or being overly self-pitying – he’s an incredibly introspective filmmaker whose grounded dramas continue to move me.

One of my first introductions to his work was Hill of Freedom, and it remains one of my favorite Hong movies. It’s about a young Japanese man, Mori (Ryo Kase) who comes to Seoul to find Kwon (Seo Young-hwa), a Korean woman he fell in love with years ago. After he arrives in Korea, he frequents a local coffee shop, where he writes letters to Kwon. 

Hill of Freedom is a structural masterpiece – at the beginning, we see Kwon accidentally drop his letters on a staircase, jumbling them out of order. The movie then tells the stories of those letters in the now-random order they are now found, creating the experience of fragmented memories and new perspectives. Like many Hong films, it plays with the nebulous, human experience of time (and runs short, at 67 minutes), but stands apart from the rest due to its unique structural format and how that works in tandem with the movie’s themes.

Hill of Freedom is available for digital rental or purchase on Apple TV.