Gyeongju 2014

Choi Hyeon, Park Hae-il, returns to Korea to pay his respects to his recently deceased friend Kim Chang-hee Kim Hak-seon. A history professor who teaches in China, he is often seen as a bit of an oddball; when others try to engage him, he tends to snub them, even as he maintains a veneer of outward closeness. After the solemn visit, he wanders the ancient city of Gyeongju, famed for its tombs and tumuli, letting the quiet, age-old landscape echo his thoughts and questions about the past.

In the wandering, he reconnects with his circle of friends, including Kang, known as Teacher Kang Ryoo Seung-wan, and Lee Chun-won Kwak Ja-hyung. The trio once shared a bond over a teahouse that sits at the crossroads of memory and history, a place they last visited seven years earlier. As Hyeon continues to drift through the town, he becomes intrigued by an erotic piece of art that used to hang in that teahouse but has since vanished. His curiosity leads him to the teahouse’s current owner, Gong Yoon-hee Shin Min-a, a woman who seems to hold the key to the painting’s past and the teahouse’s evolving present. The day unfolds with an intimate pace as Gong Yoon-hee invites him closer, extending an offer to join her in bed, yet Hyeon remains preoccupied with his own thoughts and the fragment of art that lingers in his mind. As dawn arrives, he leaves the teahouse again, aware that a few people he encountered the previous day have died, a thread of mortality that threads through his reflections.

The following morning, Gong Yoon-hee shows a renewed curiosity about the erotic art she has wallpapered over, and a memory surfaces in a forthcoming flashback. In the recollection, Hyeon and his friends sit around the teahouse table, discussing the painting that bears the provocative line, “Lets have a drink and then each other.” > Lets have a drink and then each other

As the sequence of memory and present moment intertwines, it becomes clear that Kim Chang-hee’s widow has some claim to the teahouse’s past, signaling a deeper connection between the space and the friends who once inhabited it. Kim Chang-hee’s widow, Lee Na-ra, appears to have been the teahouse’s previous owner, adding another layer to the mystery and the way the past continues to surface in the present.