Hello I Am WONI Nice To Meet You (YouTube)
Kim Rieun: The era of everyone watching and listening to the same thing is over. In a time when the algorithm’s increasingly granular according to individual tastes, trends are divided between different communities like fandoms. So how do you reach more people without a big platform, a massive budget, or an existing following? The YouTube channel “Hello I Am WONI Nice To Meet You,” run by RESCENE leader WONI, seems to be attempting to answer that question.

Idols are expected to sell a kind of fantasy to the public, but what’s got people talking about this YouTube channel isn’t that—it’s the members of RESCENE just being themselves. When WONI visits her hometown of Geoje, she doesn’t hesitate to go right into the ocean like she did when she was a kid. In another episode, wandering the streets of Seongsu, she asks the producer point-blank in her Gyeongsang dialect, “Are we getting fed?” MINAMI, who sparked the Geoje ya-ho meme on the same channel, leans just as expertly into her exaggerated gyaru spirit character rooted in her time growing up in Chiba. ZENA, originally from Gyeongju, converses with WONI in a familiar dialect and mines the culture shock of moving to Seoul for laughs. Where most idols build chemistry through setups and structured bits in their videos, “Hello I Am WONI” puts the personal biographies of the RESCENE members—their real personalities, their actual experiences, where they’re from—up front and center.

WONI shares her first-ever fine dining experience with comedians Lee Seonmin and Yoo Young-woo, a pair she bonded with filming the driver’s ed series “My Training Mister,” and opens up about hoping to foster a genuinely close relationship with her “uncles.” She’s equally candid in conversation with SULLYOON from NMIXX about the difficulties that come with being under a smaller label and about how interested she is in winning No. 1 on a music show. In a world where we tend to get the same images of people refiltered and repackaged over and over, there’s something incredibly rare and equally valuable about how honest “Hello I Am WONI Nice To Meet You” comes across. What the channel captures isn’t a comedic persona put on for laughs but glimpses of a real life peeking through, and audiences responded—“LOVE ATTACK,” first released back in August 2024, suddenly climbed up the charts recently, and the YouTube channel has since amassed 560,000 subscribers. In a flood of online content draped in fantasy, what people are ultimately responding to might just be the fleeting discoveries of youth everyone makes at some point.

“Afternoons of Solitude”
Nam Sunwoo (“CINE21” reporter): Spanish director Albert Serra’s films “Story of My Death,” “Liberté,” and “Pacifiction” have made him a defining voice in European arthouse cinema. Now, he’s completed his first documentary. Having spent over two decades moving between classical and modern realms, he turns his attention here to famed bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey. The camera follows Roca Rey as he repeatedly moves between his lodgings, the arena, his car, and back again. There are no interviews and no voice-overs. No narrative arc to speak of, no particular climax to wait for. What we’re given is purely audiovisual—images that capture the high-stakes moments when a man and a bull face death, and everything that surrounds them.

Threaded through the entirety is a tangled ironic energy. A matador must move in sync with the bull before he can stop it dead. The movements are deeply sensual, almost a mockery of the machismo the art exudes on the surface. The film lingers on the revelation that, without a helping hand, he can’t put on the elaborate costume that curves deeply from the shoulder and wraps the whole body. By the end, the director hasn’t taken up any particular position on his controversial subject. Instead, “Afternoons of Solitude” sits its audience down to become part of the crowd surrounding the bullfighting arena with all the injustice in the beauty and the beauty in the injustice on full display. Put another way, the torero and the filmmaker both command chaos and submit to it willingly. The question of whether they’re motivated by being courageous or simply daredevils should be set aside for the time being. Theirs may be an unsavory brand of suspense, but it’s unquestionably gripping.

“The Last Balloon” (Tank and the Bangas)
Kim Hyojin (music columnist): When Tank and the Bangas released “Green Balloon” in 2019, the album was full of potential that reflected the raw vibrancy and unpredictable energy of New Orleans. “Red Balloon” took that same energy, stretched it even further, and smoothed it out into something sleek. They mashed up R&B, funk, jazz, hip hop, and gospel to show just how teeming with life their music could be, and while they held onto their sense of spontaneity and fun, they also refined their sound down to the last detail to give the album a clear sense of progression. You could feel how intensely they had wrestled with their musical potential and identity.

Now the group’s no longer trying so hard to prove anything. Instead, they just let the rhythms that make you move your body, the hooks that draw the crowd in, the resonance of the gospel, the half-spoken lyrics, and the gentle emotional arcs unfurl organically. “Move” is a lush track featuring Lucky Daye’s singing overtop of a driving percussive groove, “Go Your Own Way” (feat. Hasizzle) is steeped in New Orleans bounce, and “Whole World” (feat. Ledisi) conjures up a music festival from its brass to the layers of keyboards, guitar, and more. Every song calls the listener on to move.

The world’s still a complicated place, and life still doesn’t go the way it should, but Tank and the Bangas are making all their own decisions anyway. With beats that make you move, choruses that make you sing along, and endless overlapping voices, the band’s not trying to change the world around them, just change the way someone feels their way through it. Their latest album doesn’t feel like an escape from reality, but like a way of moving through it differently. When life gives you frustrating lemons, let everything go and dance.