North Hollywood, Forever
Audience award, Ridgeline Film Festival 2024. Official selection, Ninth Street Film Festival 2025.
The programmer's note
The funniest film in the catalogue, and the one people are most surprised by, because Park is known here for the night work. It leaves on the fourth of September. Watch the taping sessions as a structure: they are all shot the same way, same lens, same mark, and the variation is entirely performance, which is a hard thing to hold for ninety minutes. Ida's third tape is the scene we would show anyone who says comedy is not directing. Bring somebody to this one.
The film
Eugene Bae shoots self-tapes. Forty dollars for two scenes, reader included, in a converted garage off Camarillo with a grey backdrop and a good enough light. He has been doing it for six years, which is four years longer than the plan was. His regulars are a cross section of the industry's lower middle: a soap actor on the way down, a nineteen-year-old with a manager who charges her, and Ida Ferrante, who takes the Tuesday six o'clock and has not booked since a pilot in 2020. The film runs a year in Eugene's garage, which is also a year in the room where people are most honest and least seen. Park keeps the camera on the person taping rather than on the tape, so the comedy comes from watching a man react to other people's careers while refusing to have one of his own. There is a wedding, a genuinely bad manager, and a very funny sequence involving a horse. By the time the film lets Eugene stand on the mark himself, it has earned every one of its hundred and two minutes.
