Photos: KOGONADA: A WAY OF LOOKING to Open at Metrograph In Theater

Metrograph presents Kogonada: A Way of Looking, beginning November 6 at Metrograph In Theater. First making his name as a keen-eyed and nimble-minded video-essayist, South Korea-born, Midwest-raised filmmaker Kogonada made a splash in 2017 with his feature directorial debut, Columbus, an idiosyncratic and wholly original approach to the city symphony film. To accompany the run of his new feature, zi, an opaque and mesmerizing work of unfettered inventiveness that reunites him with actress Haley Lu Richardson, Metrograph will be screening Columbus, a selection of Kogonada's essay-film shorts, and a selection of movies picked by the filmmaker as key influences on his latest, an intriguing trio to say the least, consisting of Lou Ye's Suzhou River, Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Asako I & II, and Alain Resnais's Je t'aime, je t'aime.

'The idea of echoes in cinema has always captivated me—especially the different forms and implications of this phenomenon. Film is able to play with repetitions, imitations, and doublings in a way that is particular to the medium itself. But for me, the idea of echoes is more than a technical interest. It is deeply existential. We carry the traces of time and being with us, and the fragmentation of our modern world amplifies this temporal phenomenon. Je t'aime, je t'aime, Asako I & II, and Suzhou River are films that each engage the echoes of existence in different ways.' —Kogonada

Kogonada: A Way of Looking runs from November 6 to November 13, with select encore screenings to follow. Titles include Kogonada's Columbus and zi, Asako I & II, Je t'aime, je t'aime, and Suzhou River, and the short essay-films—which will each screen paired with showings of zi—Hands of Bresson, Linklater: On Cinema & Time, Mirrors of Bergman, Way of Ozu, What Is Neorealism?, and The World According to Koreeda Hirokazu.

Filmmaker Kogonada, actors Michelle Mao, Jin Ha, Haley Lu Richardson, and producer Christopher Radcliff will appear in person for opening weekend.

Columbus

dir. Kogonada, 2017, 100 min, DCP. Modern architecture acts as a vehicle for emotional expression in Kogonada's lauded first feature, whose title refers to the Indiana city that, thanks to the patronage of Cummins diesel engines company cofounder J. Irwin Miller, has commissioned buildings from master builders including I.M. Pei, Eero Saarinen, and Robert Venturi. A Korean American translator (John Cho) arrives in this curious testing ground for advanced architecture after his estranged scholar father falls ill, there to cross paths with dad's protégée (Parker Posey), an aesthete clerk at the local library (Haley Lu Richardson), and a bevy of singular structures. A film of rich colors and muted yearning, and one of the most distinctive debuts in the last decade of American independent cinema.

Q&A with filmmaker Kogonada and actor Haley Lu Richardson on Sunday, November 8.

Zi

dir. Kogonada, 2026, 99 min, DCP. 'Poetic, political, and above all incontrovertibly material' [The New Yorker], Kogonada's fourth feature, the experimental drama zi, follows the title character, played by Michelle Mao, a concert violinist whose aimless peregrinations through the streets of Hong Kong are interrupted by visions of what may be either her past or future, a condition she attempts to explain to a new American acquaintance (Haley Lu Richardson, Columbus) while a stranger (Jin Ha) observes the pair from a distance. A valentine to the textures and colors of the Fragrant Harbor as seen by night, featuring music by the late Ryuichi Sakamoto, the formally audacious, shot-on-the-fly zi is a film of unusual delicacy and reserve, one whose air of mystery abides long after the credits have rolled. A Grasshopper Film release.

Q&As with filmmaker Kogonada and actors Michelle Mao, Jin Ha, Haley Lu Richardson, and Christopher Radcliff on Friday, November 6 and Saturday, November 7.

Introduction by Kogonada and Haley Lu Richardson on Sunday, November 8.

Asako I & II

dir. Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2018, 119 min, DCP. Following up Happy Hour, his justly acclaimed epic of everyday life, Hamaguchi offers a different but no less quietly revolutionary vision with this pop romance that moves from youthful exuberance and delusion to mature circumspection and compromise, while keeping up throughout a magical tonal balance of wistfulness, comic buoyancy, and the ineffably heartbreaking. As a student in Osaka, Asako meets and falls in love with a drifter named Baku who one day drifts right out of her life. Two years later, working in Tokyo, she sees Baku again—or, rather, a young, solid businessman named Ryohei who is Baku's double in every respect save personality. After initial astonishment, they begin to build a life together—but a twist in circumstances threatens to tear it all down, and forces Asako to confront her long, lingering love affair with a half-ghost fantasy.

Introduction by Kogonada on Saturday, November 7.

Je t'aime, je t'aime

dir. Alain Resnais, 1968, 91 min, DCP. A 'quiet mixture of science fiction with a love story as subtle as anything in Rohmer or Rivette' [Raymond Durgnat], Resnais's definition-defying film stars Claude Rich as an unsuccessful suicide who, on leaving hospital, agrees to participate in an experiment in time travel—one that will bring fragments of his past rushing back is disordered shards.

Introduction by filmmaker Kogonada on Sunday, November 8.

Suzhou River

dir. Lou Ye, 2000, 83 min, DCP. Taking its name from the polluted river that flows through Shanghai, director Lou's hometown, the brooding Suzhou River uses the singular first-person perspective of its unseen videographer-narrator to explore the grubby underbelly of the city, observing the story of an unsuspecting motorcycle courier who finds himself snared in a kidnapping plot and murder rap. A seductive, intricately structured stylistic coup from the Sixth Generation filmmaker, drawing on influences from film noir to Vertigo (1958) while developing its own idiosyncratic and haunting visual vocabulary.

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