House of Hummingbird (2018)

Year: 2018 Director: Kim Bo Ra Runtime: 138 min Country: South Korea, USA Language: Korean with English subtitles Rating: M18 Awards Best International Narrative Feature Tribeca Film Festival 2019 Youth Jury Generation 14 Plus Grand Prix (Best Feature Film) Berlin International Film Festival 2019 NETPAC Award (Best Korean Feature Film) KNN Award (Audience Award) Busan International Film Festival 2018 Synopsis House of Hummingbird is a coming-of-age drama centered on the quiet, unexceptional eighth-grader Eunhee. It is 1994 in Seoul. The South is in the grips of World Cup fever, while the North mourns its recently-deceased dictator. Euhee registers all of this only in passing. Drifting through her days, she feels like an outsider everywhere: at school, where she struggles to find meaning in the friendship of her peers, and at home, where family life consists of putting up with her parents’ constant quarreling and her brother’s bullying. Yet, through it all, nothing really moves her— that is, until she encounters her cram school’s new Chinese tutor and, with unexpected intensity, an unlikely friendship develops between them.