This directorial debut feature begins with a seemingly ordinary event: a teenage girl and her 10-year-old brother lose their way on the German rail. They only realise too late that the train is going in the wrong direction. They watch as they pass Cologne. This peculiar episode sets the tone for the deep topics of this movie: inescapable alienation and longing. In other words: feeling like a stranger wherever you go.

At the heart of the story is Moon Sori (Lee Juho), a young artist grappling with the trauma of compulsory military service and the challenges of adapting to a new country. The question that haunts him is simple yet profound: how can he escape the feeling of loneliness and longing that follows him everywhere? The film blends elements of autobiography and fiction in a lyrically ascetic, visually rich, and seductive style.

The making of the film is as personal as its narrative. Koutzev first worked with Lee Juho, a fellow student at the Cologne School of Media Arts, on an earlier, shorter, and more scripted version of the project. Lee, an animation filmmaker and painter, brought a quiet, natural presence to the screen that inspired Koutzev to expand the idea into a full-length feature. Moon Sori is a fictional character rooted in both the actor’s and the director’s real experiences. Sori mirrors Koutzev’s own sense of being caught between his native Bulgaria and Germany, where he grew up and still lives, creating a layered portrait of someone navigating memory, alienation, and identity.

The development of the film was gradual. Koutzev worked scene by scene, allowing the rhythm and emotional texture of the story to materialise naturally. Every shot, gesture, and movement is meticulously planned yet appears spontaneous. The cinematic space mirrors Sori’s inner state: a world where the familiar and the alien coexist, and the act of observation itself carries emotional weight.

Memory and its preservation are central to the film. Stefan Koutzev draws inspiration from late French theorist Jean Baudrillard’s last book, Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?, which argues that the world is in a constant state of vanishing due to the saturation of images, technology, and the transformation of reality into the virtual and the hyperreal. Disappearance is a fundamental, an inherent aspect of existence rather than a total, immediate extinction. Baudrillard observes that technology and media have replaced the “real” with simulations, causing objects and experiences to vanish into their own representations.The overwhelming flood of images and information leads to the “pulverisation of consciousness,” making the tangible world feel increasingly ephemeral. Why Hasn’t Everything Disappeared Yet? meditates on these ideas, showing how Sori’s memories weigh on him while also structuring his perception of the world, exploring the tension between presence and disappearance, reality and representation.

The most crucial events occur in the first half of the film. There is, for instance, a long phone conversation with his mother, during which Sori asks her about her earliest memory and shares his own: hiding under a table and watching his parents. In the same conversation (in Hong Sang-soo`s highly realistic and conversational style), Sori poses the key phrase of the film to his mother: “Why hasn’t everything disappeared yet?” Another memorable moment is a conversation with a friend in a bar, where Sori talks about his military service and admits that his parents do not know he dropped out of university – or even which city he currently lives in. The friend unexpectedly scolds him for the reckless and irresponsible behaviour toward his parents.

As the film moves toward its conclusion, Koutzev indulges in contemplative imagery. A long, quiet scene of a funicular ride allows viewers to dwell in Sori’s interior world. The final shots return to the themes of travel and migration – a prolonged sequence at an airport, observing planes preparing for departure. The film wraps with a note on suspended observation, leaving the audience with the lingering sensation of movement, transition, and the strange simultaneity of arrival and departure. And just like that, in a world where nothing ever truly disappears, even lost travellers find themselves curiously caught between nowhere and everywhere – just like the trains that do not quite go where they are supposed to.

Why Hasn’t Everything Disappeared Yet? premiered at the 55th International Film Festival Rotterdam.