Michelle Zauner

“This was my number one film that I wanted to grab. I haven't seen A Brighter Summer Day, but I'm a huge fan of Yi Yi. And I love Edward Yang's work. I think that he has maybe the greatest eye for composition of any director ever. I just love the stillness of his movies and just the way that the shots are composed and their so kind of melancholic and profound and quiet ways. And yeah, I was told by many people that I needed to also watch A Brighter Summer Day. So I'm very, very excited to watch this probably as soon as I get home.”

“Still Walking. I'm a huge fan of Kore-eda. The tone of his films and the pacing and the performances are always so incredible. And there's just this real, tactile, kind of naturalistic feeling in all of his movies that I find to be very haunting and stick with you for a really long time. So I'm a big fan of his, and he's one of those directors– I want to see every movie that he's ever made. One of my favorite directors. Very, very excited to check out this film.”

“This is my final pick. It's The Spirit of the Beehive, which is both a great band and film. This young, six-year-old actress, that, yeah, has these eyes that looks like it's seen maybe 40 different lifetimes. They just have such great depth. And her performance is stunning. It's a beautiful, haunting film, and I can't wait to revisit it because I remember loving it so much. And yeah, I'm excited to add it to my collection.”

“I do want to start, actually, with this incredible Fellini box set. I came in here wanting to get I vitelloni because I… I saw that film for the first time a couple years ago at a Fellini retrospective in Eugene, Oregon. And I went with my two friends Cordell Stetson and Carrie Mann who really introduced me to film at a young age. I remember having a Eugene Weekly that we tore out and them making me this amazing, comprehensive list of films that I should check out. But when I went and saw I vitelloni, it felt like a really special moment because it's kind of about a band of… slackers that are stuck in a small town, and I feel like that was very much who we were as teenagers. And I think that watching movies was kind of our way of getting out of that small town. And I feel like it's a really underrated Fellini movie, and it's really, really great. And this is an incredible box set that looks like it's filled with records, but is filled with films. So I'm very, very excited about this.”

“I just got back from Korea. I lived there for all of 2024 to study the language for my second book that I'm working on. And to completely immerse myself in the language, I decided that I was only going to consume content that was in the Korean language. So I only listened to Korean music and I only watched Korean films. And there's something there called the Grand Bell, which is like their… I don't know, Cannes or their Oscars. And so I wanted to watch all of the films that had won Best Picture in the Grand Bell and learn a lot more about Korean cinema, which is so fantastic. And I'm surprised I never got around to watching it, but this movie called The Housemaid by Kim Ki-young. Yeah, it's pretty much any one of your favorite South Korean directors, they probably will have said that they were influenced by this film because it's very famously one of the greatest South Korean films of all time. And it's a part of this Martin Scorsese World Cinema Project box set, which seems to have a bunch of really fantastic films that I'm sure are all really great. And so, yeah, I'm excited to finally watch Kim Ki-young's The Housemaid.”