Around the circled word, ‘attacks’, is a larger circle within which it says, ‘the dream is real’.

I once read that there are multiple proofs of infinity and I remember only two things distinctly about the circumstances: that I only read a few of the examples and that I intended to return to read the rest of them. The two proofs that I remember are that an object can be infinitely divided and that an object can infinitely disappear into the distance. I have never been able to find this piece of writing again and every few months I type into a search engine, ‘proofs of infinity’ and look at a few links hopelessly.

In my favourite earlier Hong Sang-soo film, The Day he Arrives, a version of the same scene repeats three times but there is a thin narrative thread that progresses through them – the film cannot be reduced to either a repetition or a chronology and I think the impossibility of this resolution is a type of infinity. A metal ring puzzle appeared at my grandparent’s house one Christmas when I was a kid – just one solid ring hooped through another solid ring, but allegedly they could come apart. I could not solve the puzzle so I took it and I imagined that one day I would pull the rings at some certain angle and they’d come apart. I think of that film as those rings in my pocket.

Two curved lines extend from ‘a person has a dream’, one to ‘the dream is real’ and another into ‘attacks’ and out the other side, through the boundaries of both circles to a squiggle that I cannot read.

In Pereda’s Fauna, playing siblings visiting their parent’s home, Gabino (Lázaro) returns from a long night with his shirt covered with breakfast that a waitress threw at him. Luisa remarks that the waitress is the daughter of a miner that went missing; Rosendo Mendieta. Luisa asks Gabino to tell her about the book he is reading and the film breaks to the story of the book. This new story is made of the same town, with the same actors and in it Gabino’s character seeks a man who is eventually disclosed to be Rosendo Mendieta. Gabino’s shirt is covered by breakfast thrown by the daughter of a character in his novel/the character in the novel disappeared in the reality that Gabino is narrating from. In Fauna, the irresolvibility of which fiction is containing which is a kind of infinity. In the last moment’s of the film, Luisa and Gabino’s voices return to narrate the novel. When Gabino asks if he can tell her something and his character in the novel leans over to whisper in the woman’s ear, I felt a shock like finding an object you dreamt of in your bag or recovering the feeling of being in love, out of the blue, when it was lost to you.

Hong’s more recent films feel less pocket-sized but when I think of the scene near the end of By the Stream where the students answer the question, ‘what kind of person do you want to be?’ the scene emits a glow that communicates through the film. It is less a textual relationship where the words exchanged reflect on the passed action, than it is a relationship of brightness. It is meaningful that Kim Min-hee’s character isn’t present; her loneliness is wise to how she finds herself outside the story.

On the far left of the page it says ‘dream’ with scribbles all around it. These same scribbles are also around the statement ‘a person has a dream’ and around the outside of the larger circle. There is something on the bottom left of the map that could be a legend that defines the scribbles as ‘field of maybe’.

In her novel Indivisible, Fanny Howe writes, “There is a kind of story, God, that glides along under everything else that is happening, and this kind of story only jumps out into the light like a silver fish when it wants to see where it lives in relation to everything else”. Here, is God being addressed or is God a kind of story? In Lázaro de Noche, Aladdin is the story that surrounds and shows itself at the end of the film. It comes in through a small crack – at Lázaro’s birthday dinner they listen to a recorded interview with a woman that led them in a literature workshop in which Luisa wrote again the story of Aladdin. The characters sleep in different positions throughout the professor’s apartment and through the window they’re seen turning different directions at the intersection, like an incantatory path to where Aladdin lives with his mother high up on a rock.

I remember Nicolás responding in Toronto to the question of why Aladdin wishes for food when he could have anything. If Aladdin wishes for food, he experiences the wish to the last morsel, extending it to the washing of the dishes in the stream and selling them in the marketplace, making time work for him. If he were to wish for something that substantially changed his circumstances, the wish would no longer be visible and he would want something else, the wish losing all pleasure and meaning. Aladdin’s desire is the night of the movie, it surrounds the story and sits beside Lázaro in his ineffectual reach toward the role in Esquivel’s film and his relationship with Luisa, a wish that is spent to wish again. In the first scene, after Luisa drinks a glass of water, she stares out at an LED light that stays on day and night. Maybe it is the candle that Aladdin and his mother feast by.

I met Lázaro once – I was having dinner at a large Spanish restaurant in Mexico City that resembled a community hall and there was an earthquake alarm, or a rumour of an earthquake alarm that elicited the same response. There was a birthday party for a movie star in a backroom that heard of the alarm and sent a slow tide of film professionals moving over the seated dining room toward the exit, one of which was Lázaro, who stopped at our table and told us there was an earthquake. We stood in the street where the party was easily reconstituted and the night was assuredly still until people started drifting back inside. Passing our table in the returning direction, Lazaro invited us to the party but we decided it wouldn’t be comfortable and left after our meal.