A Traveler's Needs

A French woman named Iris is living in Seoul with no clear explanation of how she got there or what she did before. Short of money, she takes up teaching French, working with a pair of Korean women and developing an unconventional approach built around small writing exercises that draw out her students' feelings. Over the course of a single day she moves through a series of encounters with students and strangers, asking them about poetry, their pasts and their sense of self, while finding comfort in barefoot walks, lying on rocks and the Korean rice wine makgeolli.

A Traveler's Needs is a drama directed and written by Hong Sang-soo, the eleventh of the fifteen features he has made in chronological order, following In Water and preceding By the Stream. Isabelle Huppert plays Iris, with Lee Hye-young, Kwon Hae-hyo, Cho Yun-hee, Ha Seong-guk and Kim Seung-yun in supporting roles. Kim Min-hee and Hong Sang-soo produced the film, a Korean-French co-production between Jeonwonsa Film and Les Films du Camélia, running 90 minutes.

It was released in April 2024. On IMDb it holds a rating of 6.4 out of 10 from around 1,300 votes, and on TMDB 6.5 out of 10 from a much smaller number of votes, while a critics' rating stands at 6.9 out of 10 from 42 reviews, slightly above the audience scores.