Davy’s Chou’s drama about the influence of parents even after many years
French-Korean Frédérique Benoît is 25 years old. When she was a baby, her parents gave her to the Hammond Adoption Center in Seoul, which helps children from poor Korean families to find new parents abroad. Twenty-five years later, thanks to accidental meetings and signs and questions she has, Freddie ends up in Seoul and starts looking for her biological parents.
Director Davy Chou was inspired to write Return to Seoul by the true story of his friend. In 2011, while filming his first feature film, Golden Slumbers, his friend asked the director to go with her to meet her biological family, who she had not seen since she was adopted and left for France. Another girl who influenced the film was the actress who played the main role, the artist Ji-Min Park. She worked with Chou on the script and the image of the main character, Freddie, aiming to avoid the stereotypical reactions and characteristics that the director’s male gaze had assigned to her. Ji-Min gives a deeply psychological performance that tells the story of eight years in Freddie’s life, her transformations and transition to adulthood, her leap across the cultural divide, and her meetings with her parents. She cannot stand her father’s reserve and her friends’ diffidence, but gradually, as she becomes accustomed to the culture and customs of the country, she accepts her identity as being of Korean origin and finds her place there.
Cinematographer Thomas Favel, who filmed Freddie’s story, combined the slow, contemplative gaze typical of cinematographers from Korea and South-East Asia with techniques from American genre cinema by David Fincher or the Safdie brothers. This underlines the dual nature of the main character’s life and the gap between the western culture she is used to and new and unfamiliar Korean culture. The film premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival and the won the Asia Pacific Screen Award for Achievement in Directing.
The film will be shown in French, Korean, and English with Russian subtitles.
Return to Seoul
Director Davy Chou
France, Germany, Belgium, South Korea, Romania, Cambodia, Qatar, 2022. 119 min.
18+