Last but no means least in my Glasgow Film Festival coverage is the excellent Hommage. It's a powerfully understated drama that looks into the past of Korea's film industry and explores the trouble facing female directors who historically operated within its circle- introducing us to Lee Jung-eun as an underpaid director who has made three films yet is losing money each time out. As she is approached to restore a project she begins to find that she has more in common than she first thought with the director behind her source material - and on top of that, a simple restoration proves to be far more complex when they discover that the film itself has been altered.
The spot-on gags about voice acting lend an air of humour but this is not a comedy - it's a drama with almost an element of mystery; at once a reckoning with the past and dare I say it? a ghost story on top of that. It's not the only film that I watched at GFF to grapple with directors and movies and use that as a way of dealing with the past of the nation in question showing what film can mean to different people - but it showcases the true variety of this genre; it feels a world removed from One Second, for example, which having watched back to back allowed for an inspired pairing.
Hommage is a quiet movie, one of inward reflection and soul-searching - that doesn't swing for the fences in big, loud gestures but instead paces methodologically and comes away as a real surprise for doing so. I hope this gets a wider release as those who watch it will quickly fall in love - especially if you're a sucker for any kind of movie that looks at the history of film and its impact on a global scale.
