Davy Chou came to Deadline’s TIFF studio with his star Ji-min Park, a first-time actor who made waves in Cannes when their Discovery presentation Return to Seoul debuted there in May to great acclaim in May. “It’s the story of a 25-year-old French girl named Freddie,” explained Chou. “She was born in South Korea but she was abandoned by her Korean parents and adopted by French parents. So she grew up in France, and the story starts when she first goes back to South Korea on holiday, wanting to enjoy her time there and with no thought of going on a journey into her roots [or trying] to find her biological parents. But after three days, she meets her Korean father, and that’s the beginning of the story. Or maybe the beginning of the problems.”
The inspiration for the project, said the French-Korean director, came from a very personal place. “The story is based on the true story of one of my very close friends in France,” he said, “and in 2011, when I first went to South Korea to present a film, she accompanied me. We ended up meeting her biological father there. I was pretty young, and I just liked seeing that scene and seeing the interaction between them. Seeing the very complex and contradictory feelings [behind] two different sides of a broken history was very, very special — and shocking. And that’s what I kept in mind.”
Cannes Review: Davy Chou’s ‘Return To Seoul’
Ji-min, a visual artist in her normal working life, came to Chou’s attention via mutual friends. She was intrigued enough to spend hours discussing the movie, but she was not easy to persuade. “I was not thinking about playing in a movie,” she said.
“I had to convince her to come to make the movie,” Chou said, “and somehow the personal connection between the two of us, and maybe the personal trajectory of each of us, resonated together and resonated with the story. So I asked her to make a screen test, and on the first test she was amazing.”
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