Another year, another Hong Sang-soo screening. This is MDFF Select’s fourth consecutive year hosting the Toronto premiere of a film by the most prolific auteur of the new millennium. His 29th feature is once again artistically fresh with ingenious experimentation and new ways of pushing his filmmaking to higher levels of intimacy. This time, his provocation is focus, or lack of focus, where much of the imagery is blurry and abstracted. The result is the epitome of Hong in that it is impressionistically painterly while being utterly prosaic. We follow a young actor, Seong-mo (Shin Seok-ho), who recently gave up acting and has decided to make a film with his own money. Of course, Seong-mo hasn’t decided what to make and spends the duration of the film in search of an idea. In Water had its world premiere in the Encounters competition of the Berlin International Film Festival. Here, the film will be screened alongside Pedro Costa’s short film The Daughters of Fire as part of a pairing entitled Fire + Water, curated by Cinema Guild.