‘A Hard Day’ Buy Puts Kino Lorber In Summer Thriller Game

Kino Lorber has acquired North American rights to the South Korean thriller A Hard Day, the pic that world premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight section at Cannes last year before grossing more than $26M in six weeks as a summer release in its home territory. The plan is to release the pic, written and directed by Kim Seong-hun, in the summer in the U.S. It’s a rare action movie play for art house distributor Kino Lorber, which for example is in the midst of platform releasing Jean-Luc Godard’s 3D Goodbye To Language.

Other recent releases for the distributor, which specialized in foreign-language indies, include Farewell Herr Schwarz, Bruno Dumont’s miniseries-turned-feature P’tit Quinquin and Tip Top.

Hard Day centers on homicide detective Geon-soo Go, who in less than 24 hours receives a divorce notice from his wife, his mother passes away, and with his co-workers becomes the focus of a police investigation over alleged embezzlement. On his way to his mother’s funeral, he commits a fatal hit and run and then tries to cover it up by hiding the man’s corpse in his deceased mother’s coffin. But when Go gets a mysterious call from a person claiming to be the sole witness of the crime, he realizes someone has been watching him all along.