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JANG Woo-jin’s new arthouse film Winter’s Night has added to its awards haul after winning a pair of prizes at the Black Nights Film Festival in Tallinn. The film earned the Best Director and Best Actress Award for SEO Young-hwa at the festival which concluded earlier this month in Estonia. This comes shortly after it earned the Special Jury Prize at the Festival of the Three Continents in Nantes. 

A story of a middle-aged couple revising a country town they visited in their youth, Winter’s Night was one of the three Jeonju Cinema Projects presented at the Jeonju International Film Festival in spring. Director JANG previously earned the Grand Prize from Jeonju with his debut film A Fresh Start (2014). 

The Jury in Tallinn offered the following comments with JANG’s Best Director Prize: “For depicting the disintegration of a relationship through a striking poetic cinematic language, formal rigor, and the creation of a mesmerizing and highly original world. The film intertwines past and present, beginnings and ends, into a highly engrossing, layered, melancholic, and uncanny viewing experience in which every element of the cinematic grammar, from cinematography to mise-en-scene, elevates one another with the uttermost coherence, subtlety, and integrity.”

Regarding the award for SEO Young-hwa, also familiar to festival audiences in Hong Sangsoo’s On the Beach at Night Alone last year, the jury wrote: “In a story of miscommunication, the actress manages to keep the attention of the audience all through pauses, silence, and the sometimes complete absence of dialogue that are crucial to the storytelling. While maintaining a well-balanced scale of recognizable emotions she invites the viewer to join her in the unspoken, thus becoming a part of the relationship, and thus becoming a part of the emotional core of the story.”