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Anker is released from prison following a fifteen-year sentence for robbery. The money from the heist was buried by Anker’s brother, Manfred. Only he knows where it is. Unfortunately, Manfred has since developed a mental illness causing him to forget all. Together, the brothers embark on an unexpected journey to locate the money and discover who they really are. The Last Viking is an offbeat, intriguing, and devious comedy about identity.
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The pathos of it all. Train Dreams the cinematic adaptation by director Clint Bentley (Sing Sing, Jockey) starring Joel Edgerton and Felicity Jones had it's International Premiere in the Special Presentations of the 2025 Toronto International Film festival. Train Dreams is adapted from the novella of the same name by writer/poet Denis Johnson.
Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) is a logger as well as railroad worker at the turn of the 20th century. He meets Gladys (Felicity Jones). Life is idyllic. More apt home life is idyllic. Robert and Gladys set up a small log cabin off of a lazy river. Soon they have a daughter. As the narration by Will Paxton states, "this was the happiest (Robert) ever was). By the nature of Robert's professions he has to leave for places far away for long periods of time. He laments that his daughter will not who is.
Once Robert is sawing logs, laying rail ties the pathos of the world is unleashed. A Chinese railroad worker is picked up by other workers and carried to a railroad bridge crossing a gorge many miles below. Robert is screaming, "What has he done!? "What has he done?!" There is no answers forthcoming, only a senseless murder.
Another logging season sees Robert sawing a large log with a very talkative Frank (Paul Schneider) a man enters the logging camp and asks the whereabouts of Frank. He than guns him down with two bullets and explains to the loggers that Frank killed his brother in New Mexico. Violence in America arrives without warning, without reason and with swift irreversible consequences.
Arn Peeples (William H. Macy) is a man with a limited and specialized job in the logging camps. He is the man who operates the dynamite. At one point around a fireside conversation he laments the fact that they are cutting down 500 year old trees. Everything is connected and there will be hell to pay.
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The randomness of it all Robert struggles with as he is trying to find his place in the world and what it all means. The cinematography by Adolpho Veloso) is absolutely exquisite and captures the beauty, the absurdity, the tragedy and the wonder of it all.
Robert returning from camp arrives as a forest fire has enveloped where the Grainier cabin was. He digs through the ash for answers and none are forthcoming. Trains Dreams is hauntingly reflective. As I watch a piece of cinematic art I place myself with the work and connect it to my life experiences and the world that I am currently breathing in. The fact that Train Dreams premiered on my birthday is not lost on me a time of usual self-reflection. The parallels of the random violence, racism and environmental destruction. there is currently an oil fracking operation on the ranch I am living on in South Texas. What is my place in the world as "immigration" use brutal state sanctioned violence on the people of America. I hope some of the answers arrive before my 80th birthday. We, the audience can at least take solace that Robert Grainier soars above the earth and finds peace.
Why did you choose Naples as the protagonist, as it were, of Below The Clouds? What attracted you to making a documentary about the city?
Naples, the Phlegraean Fields and Mount Vesuvius form an immense basin of stories. It is a place that moves continuously between surface and depth: ruins, subterranean spaces, clouds, fumaroles, tremors of the earth. But it is equally shaped by the everyday glances that pass between its people: children, archaeologists, firefighters, teachers, sailors. In this territory, there are areas of passage between what is and what could be. There are those who investigate, like the prosecutor; those who preserve fragments of memory, like Mary, the curator at the museum; and many anonymous faces that together draw an affective and moral map. Below The Clouds passes over a world that prefers to hide rather than show itself. It shows characters suspended between past and present, between light and shadow.
Can you tell us about your artistic process? How do you find your stories and protagonists? And how do you go about capturing your images?
Making my films is always a drawn-out process during which indispensable bonds are born. I actively looked for stories and people, but at the same time, I let myself be guided by what I found. The camera becomes a tool for meeting people, and mutual trust grows with the time we spend together. Only then does the time come to film, when the relationship has become alive and authentic.
Naples is usually seen as a city of Mediterranean light and color. Why did you choose to film in black and white?
Cocteau wrote that Vesuvius produces all the clouds in the world. Those clouds led me to the title and the look of the film. Below the clouds, light changes its nature: there are no shadows, and everything shows itself in another form. Black and white has allowed me to give a different definition, to look for a deeper truth in the image than the places, bodies, gestures themselves. Black and white opens up the imagination, it engages you to look at things in a different way. I can't imagine this film in color.
Your films rely exclusively on your images to make their meanings clear, without extraneous explanations. What does that mean for the way you edit your material?
I already started to edit while I was filming. Places, people and actions met in front of the camera and immediately afterwards in the editing room. Editing was not a separate task, but a rewrite that accompanied the film as it took shape. For three years, filming and editing walked hand in hand, day after day, until they became Below The Clouds.
How did your collaboration with Daniel Blumberg (winner of the Academy Award for Best Original Score 2025 for The Brutalist come about? What did he add to the texture of the film?
I have known Daniel for more than 14 years and I really love his experimental music. When I thought of the music for the final scene of the film I could only think of him. My need was not to have a soundtrack, but rather to imagine a soundscape capable of creating a suspended space in certain moments of the film. A fabric of traces, sounds, music where the instruments themselves become unrecognizable while drawing a sonic landscape.
You seem to be especially interested in transitions - between the Ganges and the city of Benares in BOATMAN; between Rome and its surroundings in Sacro Gra; the movement of refugees in Fuocoammare; the borderlands of Syria, Iraq, Kurdistan and Lebanon in Notturno. The Naples of Below The Clouds is also a city of peripheries. What interests you about working in the margins?
For me, the margin is a passage, a contact area. Documenting these places of connection and transition means asking questions and imagining a space in which the paths that intersect become the very form of the film.
All your films, while tied to a specific locale, are informed by global politics. Below The Clouds, among other things, shows the unexpected traces in the city’s fabric of the wars in Syria and Ukraine, for example. Did you consider these links in your original idea for the film, or did it emerge while filming?
Naples and the Vesuvius territory are imbued with the histories of thousands of years: peoples, eruptions, domination. This history continues to live in underground tunnels, museums, buildings. The film tells everyday stories and lives in a time that seems to have little of the ordinary, as the news constantly proves. In a planet that is becoming smaller and smaller, great history is intertwined with the daily events of men and women, generating anxiety, fragility, but also a new awareness.
The present bursts in everywhere: in a port city, for example, you encounter routes of people and goods, events near and far that intertwine. Wars, exploitation, past and present conflicts: filming the present means allowing yourself to be challenged by it all.
Did you encounter George Orwell’s writing before deciding to make a movie about his life and work? Did you read him directly, or had you already absorbed some of his ideas through popular culture, or thinkers working under his influence?
Of course, if you have gone to school, if you have gone to university, then you have to cross paths with George Orwell. That’s obligatory. I grew up in many different countries and in each of them, Orwell is (was) a known commodity. But, politically, there were more important thinkers in my life, especially coming from the Third World. My political focus was rather about the North/South axis and tensions than the West sulking on its own problems. I probably had some suspicion towards Orwell over time. When you talk to people on the left specifically, some had a troubled relationship with his political evolution. He was suspicious. Before I started this project, I talked to two writer friends—both very famous, I won’t name them—and asked them if I should make a movie about George Orwell. One of them is British, a Marxist, still very left wing. The other one is American. One said that I shouldn’t do it, the latter, amused, was looking forward to my take. These are both people with whom I share certain experiences and positions, so it rather energized me. And now, more than ever, I feel very much closer to Orwell’s way of thinking—his autonomy of thinking, outside of any sort of dogma.
Resisting dogma is a major theme of his work, which is why it’s interesting that some critics are dogmatic about him: his politics, his ideology, his affiliations...
Well, everybody has claimed Orwell. And there are many instances that he would have disagreed with. Like the CIA, which put a lot of money into the first film production of Animal Farm. For them, that book and “1984” were perfect propaganda that could be used against the Soviet Union. Even though Orwell did use extensively Stalinism as the central vehicle and inspiration for these books, but he was not strictly referring to what was happening in the communism countries in the east. They were only very potent examples. Orwell’s analysis and criticism was not exclusively towards the East. He was also talking about democracies everywhere on the planet. He was talking as well about England and other European countries. As he wrote: “But to be corrupted by totalitarianism, one does not have to live in a totalitarian country.” People tried to fit his work towards their narratives during the Cold War, but they did it using one small part of who he was.
Your film deals with Orwell’s writing and his biography and how the two are linked; the impact of growing up in India and observing imperialism first-hand is significant. The photo of the infant Orwell being held by his Indian nanny is striking and very resonant—you use it to bookend the film, and to draw out a number of different ideas and meanings...
That photo became something of a reckoning for me. I thought: ‘Oh! Orwell is a brother. This is somebody from the Third World!’ If you grow up as a child in the Third World, it changes you and your view of the world. You can ask any “westerner” who grew up in Africa or in India and their view of the world have turned either totally racist or genuinely universal. That was a starting point for me. I was working on my film about Ernest Cole, and there was a sequence where you see these nannies in South Africa—Black nannies taking care of white, blonde children. You understand the absurdity of racism when you see how those white parents would hand the most valuable being in their lives—their child—into the hands of people they totally despise, people who they consider as basically animals. How totally fucked up is that? One of the nannies says in the film: “I love this child, but I know when she grows up she will be just like her mother”. This picture of Orwell with his black nanny connected me with him: he just turns out to be a fine human being. The interpretation of this picture at the beginning of the film differs from the one at the end of the film. It’s the same photo but it means two different things. At first, we see it and think. That fragile child with his black nanny. A uniquely warm, innocent and exotic childhood. And then the second time, at the end of the film, it’s scarier. You think ‘Oh my God... That woman would have every motive to just strangle that child’. There is a sense of unease and panic. It’s as if the whole history of the world hangs on the nanny’s ability to be a correct person, not to violate that trust and that original bond.
The image of Orwell’s birth rhymes with what we know about his death; the disease that rendered him weak and helpless. That feeling manifests in 1984, in the scenes of Winston’s torture and degradation, the way he is infantilized by his tormentors...
I knew from the start that I had to find a human and emotional point of entry to Orwell’s life and work. I had to find his “boiling point”. That point is more often than not the birth of something original, bold, determining to start threading a narrative. I don’t make biographies; I choose a moment in the life of a character that allows me to tell the bigger story. For Orwell, I found that moment quite rapidly. It is the last year of his life. At that time, he pretty much can guess that he doesn’t have much time to live. He's struggling to finish that novel that will make him famous and that he will not even live to see. He died four months after releasing 1984. He will never know the impact of that novel. The dramatic undercurrent of the film tension and dialectic lies on this state of his life between life and death and the struggle of finishing his “last” novel.
Do you feel that you came to understand Orwell as a person as well as thinker while making this film?
I think I did not only understand him as a writer, a thinker, but also as a human being. Without that, I don’t think the film would have made sense to me. Even in terms of how I see the world today, this understanding was key.
At the end of 1984, Winston mentions the proles, which is not just the proletariat—it’s something bigger. It’s the whole planet, including the “Third World”. And I am trying to reclaim Orwell for that third world, for my side of the world. Just as I cannot make a movie about a writer or a thinker whom I do not fundamentally understand and whose work I respect. I did films about James Baldwin, Karl Marx, Patrice Lumumba—people I understood profoundly. I knew their fight, their conflicts, their demons even that fueled their bold and unique undertaking. With Orwell, it was the first time I was going into a film without a deep personal connection to the subject, but I was able to find my bearings very early on. As soon as I re-read this incredible and lesser-known essay entitled “Why I Write,” I knew I was there.
You quote more extensively from “Why I Write” in your film than any other piece—more than 1984, even.
That text is him. It’s all of him, it’s a confession. It’s an act of contrition. He’s not hiding anything, “...I was part of the actual machinery of despotism”, having “bullied” the natives and even hanged a few, his despise of his own social class and the classes above, the hardship of imposed poverty in London and Paris, to experience “reality”, etc. You see the man, with all of his flaws. It’s not a lecture; it’s about putting a mirror up to his own face. That idea of the mirror—that’s something else I want people to understand. I have a lot of trouble every time I hear columnists talk about “dystopia” or calling him a “prophet.” He was of course not a prophet. He was talking about the world around him. It’s not a projection, it’s an analysis. He’s working through it all: what he went through in British Imperium; what he went through in the Spanish Civil War, what he experienced in England, in Paris etc. He’s analyzing the early days of the Cold War. It’s not prophecy. It’s the world as it is, as he was living it.
What do you think differentiates Orwell’s analysis from later generations of writers?
The way I see it is this: in the 1970s, most serious writers needed to have a tremendous amount of general knowledge—about poetry, about history, about culture, geography etc... It was not as much about their inner lives or “feelings”. Inner life was the fuel, the Zeitgeist they used it to power the rest.
The recent decades, through what we could call a “democratization” of culture, and concurrently the focalization toward “the inner self”, almost anybody is entitled to write. Any experience is allowed to be printed and commercialized. You don't need the more general deeper knowledge of the universe above you nor the idea of the “collective “. You no longer must refer to the world around you. You ARE the world (or it revolves around you, personally, intimately).
We have lost the collective mind. We have lost the collective fight. I can see it in the generation after me. Nobody thinks about death the same way today, about risking one’s life for a cause. When I was studying in Berlin, I knew that I was going to go back to Haiti and die. My friends from South Africa, they knew they were going to go back to South Africa and die. My Iranian friends knew it, my Nicaraguan friends, my Brazilian friends, my Chilean friends. We all knew.
We didn’t talk about personal faith so much or about personal struggles or feelings (Not that it was a good thing. On the contrary. But it was just not proper). When the Berlin Wall fell, there was no stopping of the exuberant capitalism cries of victory. Capital had won. And so everything else that came with it. It was a complicated world, and we needed writers with a wealth of universal knowledge who could help us understand the moment beyond the allegorical Fukuyama’s “End of History”. But on the contrary, we went for full blown fragmentation, specialization, and individualism, inner soul and self-wellness among other developments. And this is in every field of all society, media, academia, politics. We lost the collective, the overall analysis. Everybody focused just on what they could chew and got lost in petty details.
In some ways, the right wing—at least in the West—has done a better job capturing the collective imagination, in politics and in popular culture as well.
It is always easier for those forces because they don’t have to care about the multitudes, nor about the truth or the nuances. They just have to care about their profits.
Capital not only has no frontier, but also tends to control politics, through different tools and procedures. To a point where any powerful president, at least in western democracies, merely has a negotiation power. We can see how President Obama, besides having inherited one of the major capitalistic crises in history, still was under the sway of the Wall Street power brokers. Every move or economic decision was the result of heavy discussion and compromise, in which more than once, banks and industry well-being were privileged over citizen interests.
Authoritarian regimes operate with less moral qualms and restraints.
The ending of A Face in the Crowd comes to mind — except that instead of being exposed by the television cameras, authoritarian leaders are emboldened by them.
There is no limit. If you just let it go on there is no ending.
In Germany in the 1930s, Hitler took at least six, seven years to become Hitler. The establishment thought that they would “control” him at the end. He had written out what he was going to do in Mein Kampf. And nobody took that seriously. It’s the same with Project 2025. At what point do you start to take warnings seriously? Bullies, authoritarians—they have no limit. It will get worse and worse until they are stopped. It's not right against left now. It’s an authoritarian regime. It’s Big Brother. It’s the same with authoritarian playbooks today, in many countries. The names change; the goals don’t. They target institutions, courts, media, civil society. They follow the same script as abusers: isolate, humiliate, intimidate. They’re predators. And unless stopped, they escalate.
I grew up in many different dictatorships. Whether it was Haiti, or whether it was the Congo... we could feel early on when something was going wrong. It’s when people cannot speak their minds anymore, when you must think twice before saying things in public, or addressing certain topics. That’s what dictatorship is. It’s little by little.
Did you know at the beginning how much contemporary politics in general—would be threaded through your portrait of Orwell?
That all came very quickly when I went through “Why I Write.” I wrote a one-page summary for our investors, and the film was all there right from the gate. Except that I didn’t realize at first that it would go so deep and dark and morph so close to our reality. When the project was proposed to Alex Gibney and then myself —we knew that we couldn’t say no: we were being offered access to everything Orwell had written. The same access I had gotten with James Baldwin’s body of work, who, as I said, was closer to home for me. When you have that kind of access and you don’t make a great film, you’re in the wrong line of work. With Orwell, it was also a once in a lifetime opportunity. What I knew I needed to find was the connection to the world I’m living in, and that’s what I mean when I say Orwell is a “brother”. He saw the world in a way I can relate to. I had my share of Big Brothers throughout my life. In my youth, the U.S. was supporting dictatorships in Haiti, killing Lumumba in the Congo and staging numerous coups in foreign countries. And Newspeak was always part of my reality. When they say “democracy”, it was never meant for the likes of me. I grew up with Newspeak. I grew up with Big Brother. In the Third World, we all grew up in the shadow of Big Brother.
The language of euphemism is another major subject in the movie; it’s the language of corporations, a sort of airbrushing of agendas, the rhetoric of hard-sell advertising.
It's corporate, it’s political, it’s military. All of it. As a Black person, my life is about deconstruction. Why do we deconstruct? Because we know that what we are seeing is not our reality. We grew up deconstructing Hollywood films because we knew that when we were seeing Indians being killed by cowboys, that they were us. To enjoy the film, we had to deconstruct it, to make it accessible (or acceptable) to us. The ironies and contradictions were obvious. Hollywood was never a “dream” for us. We grew up with that dichotomy. The movies were Newspeak.
Because American movies are so big and expensive they can be hard to deconstruct. They’re made to be solid, to be impenetrable. They’re weapons of soft power.
That power was never totally “soft” for us. The traces linger for very long. Soft power is never innocent. If you live in the West, there’s no need to deconstruct that power. That's the privilege that you have: you don't have to. Elsewhere, if you don’t deconstruct that power, it will kill you. For a more profound and definitive analysis of this, and way more eloquent than me, I would recommend The Devil Finds Work from James Baldwin. That’s what James Baldwin said about Hollywood in The Devil Finds Work.
Baldwin’s profile has been raised in the years since your documentary. There were two different movies this year—Eddington and Sorry, Baby—that used him as a reference or a signifier, and of course there was Barry Jenkins’ adaptation of If Beale Street Could Talk.
Yes, Baldwin is back, baby! As he should be. And I am glad that a whole new generation is reappropriating his work anew.
When Barry Jenkins made Beale Street he invented a new genre, a new way for black actors to work and play their parts. I have worked with black actors for forty-five years, and I can see how Beale Street was a successful attempt to propose something new, that is not a cliché. American movies reproduce cliches over cliches over cliches, sometimes ironically, sometimes not. [Jenkins] succeeded in finding a new way for actors to show emotions, to show pain, to show joy, to show love.
Is it fair to say that more movie critics have read Orwell than Baldwin?
By the sheer mathematical reality, it is evidently true. But I'm not sure that many more now have read Baldwin, if it is only to keep up with the flow.
That being said, I am sure most know about Orwell as “the prophet” rather than somebody who is actually writing about the real world. The thing about Orwell is : everything he wrote, he went through himself. The editing of the movie tries to reflect that. We can see how the physical reality of his illness—his tuberculosis—finds its echo in the rendering of Winston in 1984, where the motif of the ‘lungs’ recurs throughout. We can also observe how Orwell’s own complicated behavior with women is mirrored in the strange, often uneasy and sometimes disturbing dynamics of Winston’s short-lived and tragic relationship with Julia (‘Do it to Julia, not me!’).”
He could be an awkward man in real life. He was awkward with women. With his last wife, Sonia Brownell, he asked to marry just a few months later after meeting her although his health was already severely impaired. I can hardly believe that he was even in love. His work was his life story. He could only write about things he went through. If you read 1984 as a prophecy, you will really miss out on Orwell's essence.
There’s something adolescent about Orwell: a sense of idealism that never faded as he grew older. It’s also palpable because he had such a short life.
The adolescence you’re talking about is only possible in the West. Because you can afford to be a fully grown adolescent in the West. Orwell, protected himself from that delusion through humor, sometimes even through cynicism and wit. His distinctly British sense of distance probably saved him from despair. Because he “knew” and could not “unknow” what he had seen.
How did you go about organizing the material in the film?
My job is to find a way to make a movie that’s accessible for everybody, not just for literary savvy people. We read everything—everything that Orwell wrote and then I started to make selections from the text. I knew that I had to come up with a sort of libretto, the same way I did for James Baldwin. Making a film is obviously not like writing a book. It’s closer to the way you might write an opera, except that you’re using somebody else’s words. Orwell’s words are strong. I have to be careful though to not twist his words. My work on Baldwin did help me a lot. His humanity was closer to me and easier to handle. Orwell is more... British. You have to find the emotion in it. We took a lot from “Why I Write” because it’s more sincere, human and direct— both about himself and about the society he is writing about. It's perfect material for a voice-over.
The movie includes footage of the war in Ukraine and Gaza; these are very charged images to put in a movie about a writer who died seventy-five years ago.
I’ve been making films for 40 years. All of the movies I’ve made are about alarming people to the state of the world. I’ve never made a film that I didn’t totally believe in. And making 2+2=5 was basically like watching the news. For example, I was re-reading 1984. At the very beginning, Winston is writing his journal: “April 4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks. All war films...”. Then he basically described how the coast guards are bombarding a boat full of refugees in the middle of the Mediterranean. Sounds familiar? This gives you the chills. You basically just saw that in the Evening News! Orwell is exactly what’s happening now. Even the audience’s reaction, us, sounds so familiar: We don’t care. Every day boats are sinking. Nobody stops it.
The Zone of Interest comes to mind—that vision of compartmentalization, of living adjacent to suffering.
I lived like that in Germany for fifteen years, in that state of mind. I talked about it in Exterminate All the Brutes. I’m Black, not Jewish, but the Holocaust was also my reality. I did my film school essay at Plötzensee, a Nazi torture chamber in the middle of Berlin. There is that phrase “never again.” People see it as a philosophical sentence, barely a warning nowadays. How many people repeated “never again” again, and again, and again. The same countries that were the “liberators” do this everywhere else. It takes different forms, but you know, it’s the same.
I’ve done several films about genocide, so this is not new to me. Orwell is just the latest one. People need to look at their reality. Consumerism has overcome the West while the rest of the world is looking. They know it’s all an illusion. That you are in a sort of a bubble.
There are refugees on every corner in Paris today, or in other European capitals, where people are just being pushed from one corner to another. Just wait for the next Alcatraz city. Yet, they are the ones doing most of the “second front” to use a covid popular term. Delivering food every day, working at meat factories, taking care of the elders, etc... they were dying by the hundreds during COVID. That’s the part of the world that’s watching the “opulent” West (of course we know that it’s not opulent for everybody). I doubt that they still believe in all those well-meaning words, like democracy, justice, human rights, etc.
In the film, you quote the end of 1984, the idea of a faint hope in the darkness. Do you think that hope is real? Or is it just another platitude?
There cannot be hope without understanding. Marx wrote the same thing: you can’t push people to the barricades if they don’t know what they’re fighting for, if they don’t understand the whole system and why it is making them miserable. You can go to the barricade and burn down everything out of anger, and then what do you do after that? You still have to rebuild something. It can’t just be Christian hope—the hope that “it’s going to get better.”
Maybe it’s not hope we need; maybe we need reality. We need to cease just being consumers. We even consume democracy! We choose for whom to vote like we choose a soap bar. “Let’s try this one this time.” It’s consumerism.
What I know for sure, history doesn't function with “hope”. If you want change, you need to act upon it. If we just stare, it will just be somebody else’s plan.
There are people who really do believe that 2+2=5, of course. And others who may not believe it, but find it easier to say it.
Some people may believe that, but I don’t need to indulge in their craziness. In the beginning of the film, there is a clip of Orwell with his son Richard as he advises him: “always know that two and two are four.” Some people will tell you that two and two are five. They are called governments... big corporations. ...They will torture you... they will bribe you... etc...”
In hard times, we need to have the courage to say that: “Two and two equals four”
That’s what the film is about.
Winner of the Grand Prix at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival for Oldboy, winner of the Cannes Special Jury Prize in 2009 for Thirst, invited to the Main Competition in 2016 with The Handmaiden, and winner of the Best Director Award at Cannes in 2022 with Decision to Leave… Master director Park Chan-wook, who has captivated audiences with his taboo- breaking plots and finely rendered mise-en-scène, is back. With No Other Choice – a story he has long wanted to tell– he presents a film that is completely different from his previous works.
No Other Choice is the story of Man-su, an employee at a paper company who is so satisfied with his life that he can truthfully say to himself, “I’ve got it all.” However, after suddenly being fired, he finds himself in a battle to get re-hired in order to keep the family home he has worked so hard to buy, and to protect his wife and two children. No Other Choice depicts, through the unique perspective of director PARK Chan wook, how an ordinary person tries to overcome the crisis of being suddenly fired and draws deep empathy from the audience through its realistic situations that anyone in modern times could go through. As Man-su faces increasingly cutthroat competition to be re-hired, he comes to consider resorting to extreme measures. The inner conflict he experiences pulls the audience into a tense and unpredictable narrative.
Director Park Chan-wook’s sharp sense of ironic humor instills the distinctive appeal in No Other Choice. The film has an attractive cast of characters that add richness to the drama, including Miri, the strong wife who finds herself facing a crisis; Sun-chul, line manager at the highly successful Moon Paper, Man-su’s aspiration; Bummo and Sijo, job seekers who compete with Man-su for open positions; and Bummo’s wife Ara. With dramatic developments that oscillate between tension and release, sensuous mise-en- scène and meticulous directing, added with black comedy, No Other Choice is a truly original film that will captivate audiences in Korea and around the world
Where does this story of a failed old poet come from? What did you want to explore?
It’s the most personal project I’ve ever made. It began with an intimate question: what if I failed at art? Making films in Colombia is incredibly difficult, and after my first feature, I seriously considered giving up. I pictured myself at fifty, making a living as a teacher — which, in fact, is still how I pay the bills — and surviving on idealized memories of a past life in art. I also wanted to explore art from the inside: what it means to create, the limitations it imposes, the compromises it demands. The film grew out of a kind of exhaustion with the machinery of art, and from a longing to make something free, unshaped, with a spirit that felt almost punk. It was a way of reconnecting with what cinema once meant to me. Rather than portray myself as a filmmaker, I chose the figure of a poet, because being a poet is, if anything, even more utopian.
The film asks what art is and what it’s for. And it explores these questions through poetry, the least industrial form of art there is.
Art is often seen as something noble, but it’s also an industry, even when it’s independent. In cinema, for instance, there’s a market that dictates what audiences expect to see: certain patterns repeat, especially in Latin American cinema. As an artist, you must decide whether to cater to this external demand or question what truly drives you. I wanted to return to something more pure: a raw, visceral form of art that’s less mechanical. That’s when poetry emerged. It wasn’t a strategic choice, but an intuitive one. In my city, Medellín, I have met many poets who don’t fit the idealized mold. They’re streetwise, punk, very real, and I found them more fascinating than the filmmaker figure. Poetry has an anachronistic quality — it feels as though it still exists in the past, and that aspect resonated with me for this story. For instance, poetry readings seem almost timeless, removed from the idea of art as something utilitarian or marketable. Within that realm, there are contradictions and a very specific kind of humor that I wanted to explore through dark comedy.
The bond between Óscar and Yurlady is central to the film. What did you hope to explore through their teacher-student relationship? Is there a form of mutual salvation in it?
Yes, absolutely. Through that relationship, I wanted to explore several dilemmas I encounter in making art, especially in a place like Colombia, where social inequalities are so pronounced. Art, and cinema in particular, often operates within a logic where the creator, from a more privileged position, transforms the “other,” the less privileged character, into raw material for their work. This raises an uncomfortable question: how do you represent that “other” without stripping them of their true essence? The relationship between Óscar and Yurlady helped me address that, because she’s neither an idealized figure nor a great literary prodigy; she simply writes because she enjoys it, because she needs to. On the other hand, he’s worn out, disillusioned. In their encounter, I believe they illuminate each other: she embodies a purer, freer form of art, less contaminated by the market or the need for validation. And that forces him to confront what he’s lost. So yes, there’s a kind of mutual salvation, but not in a romantic sense, more as a chance to reconnect with what’s truly essential.
A Poet moves between comedy and drama, parody and tragedy, in a very delicate balance. How did you manage to mix those tones?
I didn’t have a clear formula, to be honest. I relied a lot on intuition. Even while writing, I was already envisioning small gags and subtle comedic moments, trusting they would work once filmed. But that’s something you never really know until the film meets the audience, so I’m still waiting to see. With this second film, I primarily wanted to enjoy the process. With the first one, I was extremely stressed, full of anxiety. This time, I aimed to make the experience enjoyable, even liberating — like a personal exorcism. Comedy helped with that: it allowed me to play, to laugh at myself, at what it means to be an artist. And at the same time, to use comedy as a means of addressing serious topics. Hopefully, that mix works, because for me, it was essential not to create a rigid film, but one that could move freely across different registers.
Your film might evoke New York Jewish comedy — with the clarinet leitmotif in the soundtrack — or a certain kind of Argentine humor. Do you recognize those influences?
Yes, absolutely. In fact, it was really difficult to finance the film because of that. A Colombian comedy about poets didn’t fit the stereotypes the market expects from a film made in my country. People told us it felt like an Argentine comedy or a Woody Allen film, and of course, when that kind of movie comes from Argentina, it makes sense and sells. But when it comes from Colombia, no one knows what to do with it. There are clear nods to the comedies you mentioned: the clarinet is an obvious parody, an absurd homage to that world of New York poets, so intellectual and sophisticated, but it’s placed in a completely different context, embodied by a guy from Medellín, nostalgic, a little pathetic, pretending to be Bukowski. That dissonance felt both funny and powerful to me, playing with the contrast between what the character thinks he is and what he truly is. That tension is very much present in the film’s overall tone.
How did you find Ubeimar Ríos and what made you trust him with the lead role?
He’s the uncle of a friend, and one day my friend told me, “Look, this is your poet,” and sent me his profile. Ubeimar is a schoolteacher who lives in a town outside Medellín, writes columns for local newspapers, has an interest in poetry and music, and organizes cultural events. He has a unique way of speaking and moving that I found fascinating. Initially, I didn’t cast him because I was set on working with professional actors. In previous projects, I had worked with non-professionals, and this time I wanted to try something different. But Ubeimar stuck with me, and I called him back. He was recovering from surgery, so we went to the finca where he lives to do a casting, and it was obvious: there was an immediate, intuitive connection with the character. What happened next was beautiful: Óscar, in the script, was a less likable character, but Ubeimar brought a humanity to him that wasn’t written. During the shoot, everyone grew fond of him. That changed everything. His presence softened the character, and despite his flaws, he became more endearing.
And Rebeca Andrade, who plays Yurlady? Why did you choose her?
The process with Rebeca was lengthy, especially in understanding the character. We held auditions at schools and high schools across Medellín for a long time. We saw many girls, but we finally found her in a public school. From there, we began an intensive preparation process with both actors, along with a coach and a team that worked with them for two months. It was a very constructive process — we went over each scene, one by one. Ubeimar had to temporarily leave his teaching job to fully commit to this acting training. It was a huge transformation. That’s when I realized that, in the end, it’s not about finding actors or non-actors, it’s about finding the right person for the character.
Where did you shoot the film? Is there also a social portrait, a view of class and its tensions in the film?
Yes, absolutely. We shot in Medellín, which is where I live and where I’ve made all my films. And from the start I wanted to highlight the difference in social classes. Óscar comes from a middle-class background, while Yurlady comes from a lower one. That tension is very common in Medellín, a city with very marked social contrasts. I wanted to address that conflict through comedy. There’s a reflection on art and its social dilemmas, on how art confronts, or doesn’t confront, those tensions. In Latin America, art tends to be very political, very social, and I wanted to play with that: with the expectation that a Colombian film must address certain themes, in a certain way.
Why was it important to shoot on 16mm?
I was looking for an aesthetic that evoked the past, because these poets are somewhat from another era. On the other hand, the film talks about certain dilemmas of middle- aged men, that time between youth and adulthood when you already start to feel outdated. I’m 39 and I’m in that place too, between two generations. I sometimes find myself rejecting the new, and other times the old. It made sense for everything to have a slightly outdated texture. Shooting on 16mm helped give the film’s world a kind of ’80s look, gritty, rough, a bit like John Cassavetes. We didn’t want a clean, shiny, digital image. We wanted something uglier, more imperfect, adding another aesthetic and emotional layer to the film. And, of course, it was a personal pleasure: shooting on 16mm is a very special experience for any filmmaker.
It’s also a story of reconciliation between a father and a daughter. Were you interested in showing that through a surrogate figure, this “false daughter” embodied by Yurlady?
The father is usually a distant figure, and the artist even more so. There’s this very strong cliché: the Bukowski-type artist is always a bad father, disastrous, egocentric. You know, all those clichés of manhood and artistry. And while I didn’t want to completely deny them, I was interested in showing something else: fragility. For me, this was the least interesting character to build a story around, because he’s not someone who draws attention. But maybe that’s what attracted me most: trying to find some beauty in that man, however small. It was also a kind of exorcism: I wanted to portray my own flaws, doubts, and contradictions.
The film was completed in early 2025 and is already selected at Cannes. Why such a fast production process?
Yes, it was very rushed. We started shooting on January 14 and wrapped around February 16, planning to take a lot of time for editing... but that didn’t happen. We also wanted to break away from today’s highly structured filmmaking logic: labs, workshops, residencies. Everything is so regulated. And sometimes the most important thing is just to make the film, even if it’s not perfect. After shooting, I locked myself in for a month to edit with Ricardo, the editor. We managed to finish a first cut, although we knew it wasn’t completely ready. Then we had to decide: keep editing or send it to Cannes? In the end we submitted it — past the deadline, I have to say — and it was crazy because they had already announced part of the official selection. But they watched it, were interested, and invited us. If they hadn’t selected it, we would’ve kept working on it. And even now, I’m not sure it was the best decision, because we’re still racing against the clock, finishing postproduction. But I think that unfinished quality suits the film’s aesthetic. In most cases, you can only make a movie every three or four years. I’d like to shoot more often, even if with less. That’s why I felt okay letting this one go, even if it wasn’t perfect — that’s probably what defines it.
