AFFD 2025 Centerpiece Film: THE MOTHER AND THE BEAR with Director Q&A
DIFF is proud to partner with Asian Film Festival of Dallas on this special screening.
The director, Johnny Ma, will be in attendance. A Q&A will follow the screening.
SHOWTIME: Friday July 25th at 8 PM
DIRECTOR: Johnny Ma
LANGUAGE: English/Korean
YEAR: 2024
RUNNING TIME: 100 Minutes
COUNTRY: Canada/Chile
GENRE: Comedy/Drama
COLOR
SYNOPSIS: In a snow-swept Winnipeg, school teacher Sumi (Leere Park) is hospitalized after a fall. On hearing the news, her anxious mother, Sara (Kim Ho-jung, Revivre), flies over from Seoul to be with her comatose daughter — and once Sara sets herself up in the young woman’s apartment, she discovers she doesn’t really know Sumi at all. Sara despairs about her daughter’s single status, so she immediately starts catfishing the pleasant Min (Jonathan Kim) to be Sumi’s boyfriend — once she wakes up, of course — and also gets unwittingly entangled with Min’s estranged father, Sam (Won-Jae Lee), who runs a Korean restaurant in the city. As Sam and the widowed Sara connect over their mutual melancholies, a chance meeting with Sumi’s co-worker Amaya (Amara Pedroso Saquel, Cha Cha Real Smooth) leads Sara to learn more about the life from which her daughter has chosen to exclude her. In a departure from his previous films, filmmaker Johnny Ma (Old Stone) embarks in a bold new direction, using suburban Winnipeg as the stage for a unique mash-up of genres – a stylized, whimsical narrative of crossed wires, secret lives, and conflicting agendas.