Hijo Mayor

Best Emerging Director Award, 2025 Locarno Film Festival
Official Selection, 2025 San Sebastian Film Festival

In Cecilia Kang’s debut, a road trip to a lakeside reunion becomes a summoning of memory across two generations of a Korean-Argentine family.

First, Argentina: teenage Lila (Anita B Queen)—pink pixie cut, Discman in hand—bemusedly watches her father Antonio (Kim Chang Sung) reconnect with old friends. These Korean men scattered by circumstance drink, play cards, sing tearful songs about mothers left behind with spoons as microphones, their melancholy both funny and elegiac. Then, Paraguay, two decades earlier: young Antonio (Suh Sang Bin) swaggers through nightclubs, hair slicked, hustling romance and bad business. Guaraní mixes with Korean, ballads bleed through karaoke bars. He loses everything on horses, walks into piranha waters.

Finally, Kang breaks the frame, filming her own parents making gochujang while thumbing through photo albums—revealing how stories get passed down, partial and rearranged like songs half-remembered. HIJO MAYOR reveals how displacement doesn’t scramble chronology but creates unexpected intimacies: Korean trot in Paraguay, bulgogi in Buenos Aires, grown men weeping into ramyun at the edge of the world.

– Anthony Yooshin Kim