Hansel: Two School Skirts
2024 · 29m · South Korea
Directed by LIM Jisun
Genres: comedy, coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, tender
Just before a dreaded in-class singing punishment, a schoolgirl who forgot her recorder at home races to retrieve it while coping with urinary incontinence.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Lim takes the most embarrassing, unspeakable thing—literal bodily failure—and makes it the emotional core of a coming-of-age film without a shred of sentimentality or cringe-humor; that's genuinely subversive, but it's also working so hard to be tender that it almost disappears into itself.
The formal restraint here—how Lim refuses to sensationalize the premise and instead locates the film's gravity in small spatial choices and the architecture of humiliation—positions this within a lineage of East Asian cinema that privileges dignity in discomfort.
The decision to intercut between the girl's frantic physical journey and her internal time-sense—letting the recorder quest become a meditation on how shame compresses time—is what transforms a high-concept premise into something that actually lands; Lim knows exactly which moments need stillness.