Tae-ju (Park Hansol), tormented by whispers and rumors swirling around her for reasons she doesn’t understand, boards a train as if fleeing. On the train, she happens to meet novelist Ewha (Ye Sujeong), who tells Tae-ju she resembles the protagonist of a novel she’s writing. Arriving at the beach, Tae-ju meets a street magician named Manhyuk (Kim Wookyum), visits a fortune-teller recommended by Ehwa, and spends some time with complete strangers at a guesthouse. Beach Fictions is a remarkable debut whose lucid, radiant, and gentle surface belies the formidable instincts and command of a powerful storyteller. Don’t hearsay and rumor—and, by extension, fiction and storytelling—take on lives of their own, indifferent to truth or falsehood, moving wherever they please? It is precisely this nature of storytelling—where an initial telling quickly takes on flesh and changes shape—that lingers throughout the film as a kind of mystery, an unfathomable abyss, an unknown destination, an uncertain question. When the same people in the same place live through cinematic time twice over, they encounter emotional states and moments of decision that are similar yet unmistakably different. Whose story is this, exactly, and what kind of story is it? When the luminous beach and gentle light envelop this world, we soon encounter a cinematic moment and the magic of cinema itself. Park Hansol and Kim Wookyum shimmer with a vitality that causes the air and moisture around them to come alive. (JEONG Jihye)