HOME TRUTHS
RETURN TO SEOUL A combative young woman seeks out her Korean birth parents….
As Dorothy once said, there’s no place like home. But what if that home is a land you left in infancy: a far-off country where you were put up for adoption by parents you’ve never known? In Return to Seoul, a South Korean adoptee who was raised in France makes an impulsive decision to travel to the nation of her birth and track down the people who gave her up.
The eight-year journey that follows is one fraught with awkwardness, uncertainty and miscommunication – the exact opposite, in other words, of the kind of uplifting, feel-good treatment such a narrative would doubtless receive in Hollywood.
‘I wanted to showcase a different kind of experience and attempt to be more faithful to the complexity of such situations,’ explains writer-director Davy Chou. ‘Going to a place you know nothing about won’t give you answers to the questions you may have.’ The French-Cambodian filmmaker knows what he’s talking about, having agreed to join a friend when she went to see her biological father in South Korea 12 years ago. ‘The meeting was so far from anything I could’ve imagined,’ he tells Teasers. ‘Instead of it being a tearful moment of sharing, there was just this dry, quiet and uneasy feeling of two continents trying to say something to each other but being totally unable to express it.’
Chou’s chum was the inspiration for Return to Seoul’s Freddie (Park Ji-min), a free spirit with a rebellious streak and little patience for Korean customs and decorum. Davy, though, dismisses any suggestion she constitutes an unsympathetic heroine. ‘Freddie is somebody who doesn’t look for your love immediately,’ he muses. ‘She seduces you in her way but doesn’t ask for your affection. She is tough and brave at the same time; she says what she thinks and follows her instincts. She’s not an easy character to deal with but I still find her very inspiring.’
It’s certainly a breakout role for Park, a French-Korean artist and sculptor with no prior acting experience. ‘She was amazing, like a raw diamond,’ says Chou. ‘She is not an adoptee herself, yet something about the character resonated with her and echoed very strongly with her life as an Asian woman living in France.’
Having been born in France to Cambodian émigrés, Chou could also draw on his personal experiences of the South-East Asian diaspora. ‘I realised I had chosen this story because I could put the most intimate things I have ever felt into it,’ he acknowledges. ‘I have a more stable relationship with Cambodia than the rather addictive one Freddie has with Korea. But I could still dig into my own reflections on what it means to come from somewhere else…’
‘I wanted to showcase a different kind of experience’ DAVY CHOU