A version of this interview with “Return to Seoul” director Davy Chou was first published in the International Film edition of awards magazine TheWrap.
In “Return to Seoul,” a young French woman named Freddie (Park Ji-min) takes a spontaneous trip to South Korea, the country of her birth, before being adopted and brought to France. During her stay, she hesitantly meets her biological father and grapples with her identity.
Over the course of eight years, we see her try and reject various versions of herself, constantly rejecting any ascribed notion of who society expects her to be. Davy Chou wrote and directed the film, basing the story on the life story of a friend and his own experience as the son of Cambodian parents who was born and raised in France.
We spoke to Chou about his new movie, which is Cambodia’s Oscar entry.
You found Park Ji-min through a friend. She is as authoritative and natural as Freddie who It’s hard to believe I’ve never acted before. Did you set out to find someone with no acting experience?
No. But the thing is, it’s a movie about identity, Korean culture, and French culture, so I was sure I wanted someone with a Korean background. But to be honest, I didn’t find what I was looking for. I couldn’t find the anger that was written in Freddie, that way of being able to express it.
When I met Ji-min, it was like a miracle to find someone who felt a lot for the character and was also able, without any training, to express very deep and raw feelings on camera. There are many things I could say about Ji-min, but one thing is that in her real work, she is a visual artist, a great artist, she is used to digging into her feelings and being honest, putting all the feelings of her in her to work. And that’s what she did in the movie.
Freddie spends the movie struggling to define herself. She flatly tells people in Korea that she is French, that her life is in France. But then there are these constant projections that she makes of herself, like when her friends tell her at the bar that she has a traditionally Korean face. That makes her uncomfortable.
There’s something for me about faces, actually. The film opens with two extreme close-ups of two faces. And then, when (Freddie is) with all the young people that she gathers around the table (in a bar), it’s a close-up of her faces. And like you said, there’s a comment about her face. I think a lot of people have the experience of when they go to the country where they have roots, you look at people’s faces and I think there’s always this question of what could have been me. I can see that socially, body language, culturally, everything is very different, but the face is similar. I wanted to (show) how this triggers a lot of different feelings about expectations, but also anger, frustration, and resentment.
Your personal story is not the same as your friend’s or Freddie’s, but did you find yourself having your own thoughts about identity and belonging while making this film?
The writing process is always a revealing process. You find yourself in a conundrum and then you get stuck on the question of legitimacy that writers ask: “Why (am I telling) that story? What brought me there? I am not Korean or a woman, I am not adopted. I suddenly understood that there was something (more): my personal experience since 2009, which is my first time living in Cambodia.
Since then, I have been between the two countries, mainly in Cambodia for the past few years. A lot of my own experience is being between two cultures, basically being like Freddie. I was very sure of my French identity when I was 25 years old, then I arrived (in Cambodia) and people said to me: “No, you are Cambodian.” And then take 13 years to understand that things may not be as easy or simple or stable as we think they are.
For me, it touches on something about the truth of the human experience: what it means to wonder who you are and where you belong.
Read more from the International Cinema edition here.
