At some point in one\'s youth, everyone is likely to experience the excitement of first love. That love is likely to find them in the mostly unlikely time and place, and the youth are likely to be drawn into it without any preparation. In August Story, we meet two beautiful youth – one female and one male – who encounter this unexpected moment. Yuk-yi, who experiences a spurt of growth, needs a new school uniform. Living with her poor father, she seeks out her uncle one hot summer day to get a part-time job. There she meets the kind-hearted Ping-on and makes friends with Wai-fong, a high-spirited girl who will be join her class come August. Yuk-yi comes to love Ping-on, who is interested in Wai-fong, who, in turn, likes Yuk-yi.
 The director Yan Yan Mak doesn’t use tightly interlinked stories to convey the convoluted nature of these three characters’ experiences of their first love. The carefully framed scenes also contain many empty spaces. Instead, the loving gazes of the characters as they carefully observe each other and the music, which conveys their emotions, are the elements used to fill in the cross-hatched stories and scenes. The congealed feelings of love hidden under the characters’ exteriors, meanwhile, are implied in a subtle manner through the editing, which, with its unique rhythm, follows and even overtakes the film’s cinematic time little by little. (KWON Eun-sun)