Hommage—A time‑bending love letter to the women history tried to erase
Introduction
The first time I pressed play on Hommage, I wasn’t prepared for how personal it would feel—like a hand reaching through the screen to squeeze mine when I wasn’t looking. Have you ever stared at a passion you love and wondered if the world would ever love it back? That’s where this story begins, with a filmmaker who can barely hear her own voice over a chorus of doubts. Yet the movie doesn’t wallow; it moves, gently and insistently, toward a kind of grace that only art—and honest work—can offer. I found myself remembering the teachers, mothers, and mentors who opened doors they were never invited to walk through, and I bet you will too. By the time the end credits rolled, I felt a renewed urge to protect the fragile things that keep us human.
Overview
Title: Hommage (오마주)
Year: 2022
Genre: Drama, Metacinema
Main Cast: Lee Jung‑eun, Kwon Hae‑hyo, Tang Jun‑sang, Lee Joo‑shil, Kim Ho‑jung (special appearance)
Runtime: 108 minutes
Streaming Platform: Not currently on Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Viki, or Kocowa
as of December 2, 2025.
Overall Story
The film opens with Ji‑wan (Lee Jung‑eun), a middle‑aged director, sitting in a theater so empty you can hear the projector breathe. Her latest indie feature is on screen, but her audience is made of shadows and a few half‑interested stragglers. Have you ever poured years into something and found only polite silence waiting? Ji‑wan knows that sting too well: a flat marriage, a son who doesn’t get her work, and a bank account that makes tomorrow feel like a problem to solve today. This quiet, awkward beginning isn’t just setup; it’s the ache that powers the rest of her journey. She walks out of that auditorium with embarrassment hot on her cheeks and a stubborn ember in her chest.
A lifeline appears in a phone call: a film archive wants her to restore a 1962 feature by Hong Eun‑won, one of Korea’s earliest female directors, titled “A Woman Judge” (often rendered “The Female Judge”). It’s a paying gig, but more than that, it’s an invitation to reach backward and touch a pioneer whose name should be common and isn’t. The assignment sounds straightforward—repair print damage, sync sound, catalog frames—until Ji‑wan discovers missing scenes that were likely cut under the censorship standards of the time. Suddenly, this is a mystery and a mission. She decides she won’t just restore a film; she’ll restore a woman’s place in the story. That decision changes the temperature of her life.
Her search leads her first to homes rather than studios: an elderly editor whose hands are arthritic but whose memory is razor‑sharp, and a projectionist who keeps a life piled around a humming lamp house. As they fold laundry together, talk drifts from splice marks to stolen credits, from dinner menus to dreams deferred—domestic labor and creative labor sharing the same table. I loved how the movie lingers on the invisible work that lets visible work exist. Ji‑wan, who has been scolded for neglecting house chores, finds solidarity with women who never had the luxury of separating art from home. Through these conversations, the 1960s stop being “back then” and start feeling like the room we’re standing in.
At home, the air is not kind. Her husband snipes about money and meals, and her college‑age son shrugs that her movies are “boring,” which hurts not because he’s cruel but because he’s blunt. The film understands this particular loneliness: when people who love you don’t know how to cheer for the part of you that needs cheering the most. Have you felt that divide at your own kitchen table? Ji‑wan keeps working anyway, building a paper trail from call sheets and diaries, learning to live with the hum of disappointment like background noise. Every clue she finds about Hong Eun‑won feels like a little victory against oblivion.
Hommage flirts with the supernatural in a way that feels like memory wearing a trench coat. One night Ji‑wan hears a voice through thin walls whisper, “Let me out,” and the next day a neighbor is found dead in the parking lot. It’s not a ghost story exactly—more a story haunted by what gets silenced, erased, or trapped. The past beckons in alleyways and projection booths, and the movie lets the borders blur between 1962 and 2022 until her research feels like time travel. The mood is gentle but insistent, urging us to listen for what history tried to muffle.
Her investigation takes her to a rundown theater where a bemused owner asks if she’s actually looking for “A Sexy Judge,” confusing the serious 1960s title with cheap exploitation. I winced and laughed at the same time; the scene captures how women’s work is routinely misfiled under joke or titillation. The projection booth is a museum of stubbornness—dusty reels, a clattering changeover system, half‑working fans. Ji‑wan digs anyway, learning that certain shots—like a woman smoking—were once snipped to keep the heroine “proper,” and with every fragment she recovers, the shape of the original film sharpens. This section plays like a detective story fueled by respect.
Piece by piece, she tracks down crew and contemporaries who remember Hong Eun‑won not as a trivia answer but as a force who had to make art in a system designed to make her quit. They speak of budgets that vanished, notes from censors, and reviews that graded women more harshly for the same choices men were praised for. Hommage is careful with this history: it doesn’t dump a lecture; it lets lived memories do the teaching. Through their voices, Ji‑wan learns that stewardship is a creative act too. She starts to guard the restoration like a child she refuses to lose.
The pressure at home meanwhile spikes: bills, arguments, small humiliations. But her relationship with her son softens as he witnesses how hard the work is and how much it matters. He tries, awkwardly, to show up—an extra set of hands, a patient ear. The change is small and believable, the kind that real families manage on their best weeks. This is where the film’s heart beats strongest: in the way care, even clumsy care, can help someone keep going. It feels honest to the bone.
When a crucial missing reel finally surfaces—misplaced in a personal stash, mislabeled, nearly lost forever—Ji‑wan must decide how faithful “faithful” should be. Do you present the film as it once circulated, or as it was meant to be seen? Does the restorer become a co‑author by choosing? The movie doesn’t turn this into a courtroom drama; it lets ethical questions glow like embers. Her choice, guided by what she’s learned about Hong Eun‑won’s intent, reconnects her to the reasons she picked up a camera in the first place.
At the restored screening, the auditorium no longer looks like a confession booth. Faces are expectant; silence is the good kind again. Ji‑wan sees—all at once—the smallness of one movie and the enormity of honoring a woman whose work almost vanished. No one delivers a grand speech, but the reconciliation in her family’s eyes says enough. When the credits roll, Hommage gently turns the mirror toward us. Are we doing right by the artists whose shoulders we stand on? The film’s final grace note feels like a promise kept—to cinema, to memory, to ourselves.
Highlight Scenes / Unforgettable Moments
The Empty Auditorium: Ji‑wan and her producer sit through their own screening, watching rows of unoccupied seats mock their effort. The quiet is almost comic, then almost cruel, and it perfectly sketches her professional limbo. It’s the kind of scene that any creator who has ever begged for attention will recognize—a line between humility and humiliation. The emptiness becomes a thesis statement: the world won’t validate you first. You have to keep walking anyway.
Laundry with the Editor: In one of the film’s most tender passages, Ji‑wan visits an aging editor connected to the 1962 feature. As they fold clothes and talk through memories, you feel how women have had to splice career and caretaking into a single reel. The domestic action isn’t filler; it’s the emotional grammar of the scene. Their conversation reframes “women’s work” as the condition of possibility for everyone’s art. It’s a small, luminous moment that Hommage is brave enough to hold.
“Let me out.”: A muffled plea through the wall jolts Ji‑wan awake, and the next day a body is found in the lot outside. The scene is eerie without being sensational; it plays like history knocking from the other side of the drywall. It threads the movie’s theme of trapped voices—neighbors, artists, women—asking to be heard. The moment lingers as a hum beneath every archive visit that follows.
The Projection Booth Relic: The theater she visits feels frozen in time, its owner confusing “A Woman Judge” with “A Sexy Judge.” It’s a bitterly funny, painfully accurate micro‑portrait of how female‑led stories get misremembered. Among dust and dim bulbs, Ji‑wan handles reels like relics, refusing to accept neglect as a verdict. The booth becomes a chapel for the film’s spiritual core: care is resistance.
Censored Smoke: As details emerge about scenes once cut—including a woman smoking—Hommage shows how respectability politics policed female characters. The revelation isn’t hammered; it’s threaded into the restoration puzzle, and it lands like a sigh we’ve heard before. By showing how tiny gestures were trimmed to keep heroines “proper,” the film exposes a quieter violence. Watching Ji‑wan choose integrity over convenience becomes that much more moving.
The Restored Screening: The finale is hushed, not triumphant, and that restraint makes it soar. You see people lean forward, listening for a voice almost lost, and you see Ji‑wan exhale as if offering the print back to its maker across time. Her family’s presence matters, but it doesn’t eclipse the larger communion in the room. When the lights come up, you feel the weight of what preservation—of films and of people—can do. It’s the kind of ending that sends you to your shelf to save what you love.
Memorable Lines
“Let me out.” – A neighbor’s voice through thin walls Four words bloom into a theme: silenced people asking to be heard. The line primes you to notice every unheard woman in the story, from the director being restored to the director doing the restoring. It also foreshadows how easily a life can slip out of frame if no one is watching. The echo of that plea haunts Ji‑wan’s work until the restoration becomes an answer.
“Boring.” – Ji‑wan’s son, dismissing her films with one blunt verdict It stings precisely because it’s unadorned, a teenager’s unfiltered yardstick for value. His word crystallizes the market pressures and generational gap that Ji‑wan wrestles with at home. As the story unfolds, the son’s perspective softens, and that tiny thaw becomes one of the film’s quiet triumphs. The movie respects how hard it is to win someone’s respect back inch by inch.
“Are you sure you don’t mean ‘A Sexy Judge’?” – A theater owner, mixing up the title she’s searching for It’s a one‑liner that lands like a thesis: women’s stories get trivialized, mislabeled, and laughed off. The joke is funny and mortifying at once, a reminder of how neglect and sexism conspire to bury serious work. Ji‑wan’s face in this moment says everything—amusement, anger, and resolve braided together. The film turns the slight into fuel for the quest.
“What is movie to her? And what is life?” – The questions that frame Ji‑wan’s inner journey These are the inquiries the film keeps quietly asking as she sifts through lost footage and living memories. They push Hommage beyond a procedural into a meditation on purpose and care. By the end, the questions feel less philosophical and more practical: how do we treat the people and projects entrusted to us? The restoration becomes her answer in action.
“Everyone is easily forgotten and abandoned in a world where all values are evaluated with just numbers and statistics, and divided into either ‘success’ or ‘failure’.” – Director Shin Su‑won, speaking about the film’s core belief Though said outside the diegesis, this line illuminates why Hommage matters. Ji‑wan’s journey is a refusal of that arithmetic: she chooses remembrance over metrics, stewardship over speed. Hearing the director articulate that ethic reframes the movie you just watched as an act of care. It also nudges us to honor the unglamorous work behind every “discovered” classic.
Why It's Special
“Hommage” opens like a whispered confession: a middle‑aged filmmaker named Ji‑wan stares at her nearly empty screening room and wonders if the story she gave years to has gone unheard. From that intimate ache, the film blossoms into a cinematic pilgrimage, as Ji‑wan takes on a restoration project that sends her across reels, decades, and her own doubts. For viewers outside Korea, quick note on where to find it: “Hommage” currently streams on Netflix in South Korea and appears on regional platforms like U‑NEXT and Prime Video in Japan; in North America it premiered at the Tribeca Festival and surfaces periodically on specialty or festival platforms, so availability varies by country. Check your preferred service before pressing play.
The first thing that grabs you is how tenderly the film treats creative exhaustion. Have you ever felt this way—when a dream you’ve nurtured starts to feel like an old coat grown heavy on your shoulders? “Hommage” answers with scenes that breathe: the hush of a dim archive, the clatter of a projection room, and the quiet tremor of a home where art and family collide. Rather than lecture, it lets moments—failed pitches, a snide remark from a colleague, a small triumph in an edit bay—do the speaking.
Writer‑director Shin Su‑won threads the story with a gentle time‑slip: as Ji‑wan restores a lost 1960s feature, she seems to drift toward the past, finding strength in the women who came before her. The time travel is less sci‑fi than soulful, a way for the present to shake hands with history. It’s clever, but never showy; the screenplay is a quiet engine, carrying us from resignation to resolve without losing the droll humor of everyday life.
At the core is a film‑within‑the‑film: the rediscovery of “A Woman Judge,” directed by Hong Eun‑won, one of Korea’s pioneering women filmmakers. Watching Ji‑wan hunt for missing scenes—from dusty projection booths to conversations with elderly crew—feels like an act of cinematic midwifery. You sense how preservation isn’t merely technical; it is emotional labor, a promise to honor names nearly erased by time.
“Hommage” is also about craft. The camera lingers on faces and hands—on splices, frames, and the tangible texture of film—allowing us to savor the physicality of restoration. Dialogue is sharp yet unhurried, and the sound design lets everyday noises—an elevator hum, a kettle sigh—become brushstrokes of mood. The cumulative effect is a film that feels handmade, like a memory you can hold.
Emotionally, it dances between melancholy and mischief. Ji‑wan’s marriage is fraying, her son is skeptical, and the industry’s micro‑aggressions stack up; still, the movie keeps finding pockets of grace. A shared cigarette on a balcony. A laugh in an edit room that breaks a long silence. These notes ground the story so its final swell of hope lands honestly, not as fantasy but as hard‑earned possibility.
And then there’s the performance at the center: a face we think we know, lit anew. When “Hommage” lets its heroine hold a recovered reel up to the light, you feel the years and the yes rising in her chest. It’s a moment that sums up the film’s gift—turning the act of looking back into an act of moving forward.
Popularity & Reception
“Hommage” built its reputation the classic way—one discerning festival at a time. After its world premiere at the Tokyo International Film Festival, it crossed oceans to the Tribeca Festival for its North American premiere, then continued through Glasgow, Sydney, Jeonju, and more. That itinerary didn’t just expose the film to global audiences; it placed Ji‑wan’s journey squarely inside an international conversation about who gets to make movies and whose histories get preserved.
Awards soon followed. At the Asia Pacific Screen Awards, Lee Jung‑eun took home the inaugural ungendered Best Performance prize—an emphatic nod to the film’s quiet power and to a career finally given center stage. Pair that with her Best Actress win at the London East Asia Film Festival and honors including the Grand Bell Awards’ Daejong Vision Award recognition for the film, and you have a title that resonated with juries across regions.
Critics championed it as well. The Spool praised the film’s “intimate, moving” portrait of a woman balancing art and life, while Backseat Mafia highlighted how the story “grows, ripens and flourishes” as Ji‑wan nears a personal reckoning. Even with a modest number of formal reviews, the sentiment was consistent: this is a delicate, deeply human drama that sneaks up on you.
Audience reactions, especially among global cinephiles, leaned personal. Festival Q&As and online threads filled with notes from editors, archivists, and multitasking parents who recognized the tug‑of‑war between vocation and obligation. The specificity of the restoration plot became a vessel for something universal—the fear of becoming invisible, and the stubborn joy of trying anyway.
International press underlined its historical heartbeat. Outlets like The Japan Times contextualized the film as a work about “lost names and memories,” reminding viewers that cultural memory is fragile unless someone insists on keeping it alive. That insistence is the movie’s pulse—and the reason it lingers.
Cast & Fun Facts
Lee Jung‑eun anchors “Hommage” with a performance that’s feather‑light in gesture yet tectonic in feeling. As Ji‑wan, she wears disappointment without bitterness, turning small domestic tasks and cramped workdays into revelatory beats. You sense a life lived in the margins of a frame, and the film invites you to lean closer until those margins become the main event.
It was a watershed role for Lee, whose international profile skyrocketed after “Parasite.” For this film she earned the Asia Pacific Screen Awards’ Best Performance and Best Actress at the London East Asia Film Festival—wins that read like overdue flowers for a veteran finally handed the mic and told, “Go on.” Have you ever watched an actor seem to exhale decades of waiting in a single scene? That’s the thrill here.
Kwon Hae‑hyo plays Ji‑wan’s husband with a complexity that sidesteps easy villainy. His frustrations and blind spots feel painfully familiar, the kind that can calcify inside long marriages. Kwon’s gift is restraint: a pause too long at the dinner table, a sigh that says what words will not. In a story about seeing what’s been overlooked, he embodies how love can fail to look carefully—and how it might learn to try.
Beyond this role, Kwon brings the lived‑in truth of a veteran character actor whose face carries the memory of countless arthouse dramas. That history becomes subtext; when he softens, however briefly, the scene brightens like a reel catching sunlight. His presence reminds us that support roles don’t just orbit a lead—they create the gravity she must push against.
Tang Joon‑sang steps in as Ji‑wan’s college‑age son, a would‑be poet who doesn’t always know how to love his mother out loud. Tang captures that tender, prickly age when opinions are loud and wisdom is still finding its words. His scenes crackle with the awkward electricity of a household mid‑renegotiation, and the film’s gentle humor often springs from his bluntness colliding with Ji‑wan’s patience.
The casting also pays off for viewers who’ve watched Tang grow on screen; he brings the openness of youth without smoothing over its self‑absorption. It’s a smart counterbalance to Ji‑wan’s weary grace and a reminder that art doesn’t only look backward—it passes forward too, sometimes via a reluctant heir at the breakfast table.
Writer‑director Shin Su‑won threads all these performances into a career‑long tapestry. From earlier festival standouts to this sixth feature, she has explored ambition, invisibility, and the systems that squeeze both. “Hommage” might be her most delicate expression of that project—an ode to the women who built a road without maps and to the artists who keep driving it anyway.
Fun fact that deepens the experience: the lost film Ji‑wan restores evokes the very real “A Woman Judge” (also translated as “The Female Judge”), directed by trailblazer Hong Eun‑won in 1962. Several festivals screened that restoration alongside “Hommage,” turning audiences into witnesses of a cultural relay—one filmmaker literally holding another’s work up to the light.
Conclusion / Warm Reminders
If you’ve ever doubted whether your work matters, “Hommage” will feel like a hand on your shoulder. Let it nudge you toward the films and filmmakers whose names were almost lost. If you’re traveling, consider using a reputable VPN for privacy as you check which region currently carries the film, and if you rent it digitally, a credit card with streaming perks can make your movie night a little kinder on the wallet. And if the story inspires you to back up your own family videos and creative projects, reliable cloud storage is a small investment in memory that pays off for years.
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