As a global crisis escalates and Korean soldiers are sent overseas, a young man in Seoul counts down the hours to his impending military service, reflecting on identity, duty, and the choices that shape us.

Before the Call is a very specific kind of film. It’s minimalist, experimental, semi–slow cinema, and it’s not trying to follow any traditional dramatic architecture whatsoever. It’s built around one character and the internal state he’s moving through right before he chooses to do something that hardly makes sense on paper: he goes back home to Seoul, even though he’s a Korean American who’s exempt from service, and he decides to enlist and be deployed to a war that doesn’t even belong to him. The film drifts between the present day — him arriving home, reconnecting with his father, seeing his ex-girlfriend Minji, hanging out with his friend — and the letters he later sends to Minji from the war. These letters are essentially the spine of the film. They’re poetic, questioning, introspective in a way that never feels like a lecture, never feels like he’s justifying himself. They’re more like somebody thinking out loud about identity, duty, guilt, masculinity, belonging, the question of “whose war is this,” and what it means to take a step that might cost you everything. - Lucy Hanna, SF IndieFest

Filmmaker expected for post-screening Q&A.

Co-presented by CAAM.