Shot over two weeks in September 2017, Grass sees Hong at his most seasonal: “When the autumn wind blows, there’s nothing like the taste of soju,” exclaims Chang-soo (Ki Joo-bong) over drinks in an intimate side-alley café. The conversation has a curious eavesdropper: veteran Hong co-conspirator Kim Min-hee as Areum, who intently listens in on every (emotional, devastating) exchange in the all-too-communal space. Crouched behind a MacBook transcribing the agonies of fellow customers, Areum wields the private discourse of others as raw material for her own imaginative writing. Importantly, she bears the same name as Min-hee’s indelible character in The Day After, which Hong completed just months earlier. As is customary for the director, loves, lives and narratives blend and bleed into one another in this sixty-five-minute treasure that takes its title from a Korean translation of Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.” The affectionate dialogues are soundtracked by Offenbach and Schubert (at times administered to comic effect), all the while Hong’s stylistic approach—interlacing testimony and fiction, coffee shop and stage— might best be encapsulated by a remix of Shakespeare: all the world's a café, and all the men and women merely patrons.