22.04. ‐ 27.04.2025
Rice Boy Sleeps

Riceboy Sleeps

Anthony Shim

Incredibly sensitive and hauntingly filmed, Riceboy Sleeps tells the story of single mother So-Young and her son. After emigrating to Canada, life certainly is not easy: Dong-Hyun must quickly become David, lest he be the strange boy with the unpronounceable name at his new school, meanwhile So-Young is hard at work trying to feed them with her factory job. This intense movie showcases the two struggling through their new circumstances, while trying to come to terms with the growing rift between them.

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Direction Anthony Shim
Country Canada
Year 2022
Duration 117 min
Language English, Korean with English subtitles
Production Bryan Demore, Anthony Shim, Rebecca Steele
Cast Choi Seung-yoon, Ethan Hwang, Hunter Dillon
Camera Christopher Lew
Script Anthony Shim
Editing Anthony Shim
Sound Matt Drake


Toronto Film Festival 2022: Best Canadian Film, Busan International Film Festival 2022: Publikumspreis

About the Director

“Anthony Shim was born in Seoul and emigrated to Vancouver with his family in the early 1990s. In a high school drama class, he quickly discovered a passion for storytelling and pursued a career as an actor. He has since appeared in dozens of projects over the course of nearly twenty years. Shim co-founded and served as the artistic director of the Blind Pig Theatre and co-founded and co-curated Railtown Lab, an initiative designed to support the development of original theatre works. He has taught acting at the esteemed Railtown Actors Studio and in the graduate programme of the Vancouver Acting School.” (Marrakech Film Festival)

Press Reviews

„Anthony Shim directs a film that does a number of things well, but most of all succeeds in presenting a rather realistic story about grief and displacement, while avoiding the reef of having another melodrama about the hardships immigrants face. As such, his characters are not presented as victims,(...), but as regular people, whose issues are universal and not immigrant-specific. This approach actually intensifies the dramatic element of the movie, without, though, crossing into melodramatic paths, with Shim retaining a wonderful balance throughout the three parts of the movie.“ (Kanos Kotzathanasis, Asian Movie Pulse)

The Director About the Film

“I really wanted the viewers to be able to experience a story and watch these characters from a very observational point of view … and form their own feelings and opinions about them,” Anthony Shim im Interview mit The Hollywood Reporter



GERMAN PREMIERE

International Feature Film Program

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