Internationally acclaimed director Zhang Lu’s 11th feature film, A Quiet Dream revolves
around the everyday lives of four friends – a young woman and three
less-than-ordinary men. Yeri, the Chinese Korean immigrant, cares for
her paralysed father whilst running the small ‘Hometown Bar’ in the
impoverished Su-saek neighbourhood of Seoul. Ik-june is a former
small-time gangster expelled for laughing during his boss’s funeral;
Jong-bin is the milk-drinking, epileptic son of the Hometown Bar’s
landlord and Jung-bum is an introverted North Korean defector who
suffers from depression.

This
film doesn’t follow a conventional narrative structure, but rather
unfolds quietly as if taken from a small segment of their everyday
lives, lives that are spent hanging out at Yeri’s bar. Although each has
their own complex issues to deal with, they somehow muddle through with
little more than friendship and laughter.

An
interesting element to this film can be seen with the three male
characters who are played by a trio of prominent Korean film directors. Each of the directors steps in front of the camera for A Quiet Dream to play a character that they had previously created in their earlier films, namely:  Ik-june from Breathless (2008), Jong-bin from The Unforgiven (2005) and Jung-bum from The Journals of Musan (2010).
This adds to the film’s dreamy and mysterious texture, blurring the
line between fantasy and what’s on screen and the reality outside of the
screen.

Much
lauded, the film opened last year’s Busan International Film Festival
and was invited to the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2017.