A version of this interview with “Return to Seoul” director Davy Chou first ran in the International Film issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.
In “Return to Seoul,” a young French woman named Freddie (Park Ji-min) takes a spontaneous trip to South Korea, her country of birth before she was adopted and brought to France. During her stay, she hesitantly meets her birth father and grapples with her identity.
Over eight years, we watch her try on and reject various versions of herself, constantly pushing back against any ascribed notion of who society expects her to be. Davy Chou wrote and directed the film, basing the story on a friend’s life trajectory and drawing from his own experience as the son of Cambodian parents who was born and raised in France.
We spoke with Chou about his new film, which is Cambodia’s Oscar entry.
You found Park Ji-min through a friend. She’s so commanding and natural as Freddie that it’s hard to believe she’s never acted before. Did you set out to find someone with no acting experience?
No. But the thing is, it’s a film dealing with identity, with Korean culture and French culture, so I was sure that I wanted someone who has 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 just, like, a miracle to find someone who felt very strongly for the character and was also able, without any training, to express very deep, raw feeling in front of the camera. There are a lot of things I could say about Ji-min, but one thing is that in her real job — she’s a visual artist, a great artist — she’s used to digging into her feelings and being honest, putting all her feelings in her work. And that’s what she did in the film.
Freddie spends the film struggling to define herself. She very adamantly tells people in Korea that she’s French, her life is in France. But then there are these constant projections put on her, like when her friends tell her at the bar that she has a traditionally Korean face. That makes her uncomfortable.
There is something for me about the faces, actually. The film opens with two extreme close-ups on two faces. And after, when (Freddie is) with all the young people that she gathers around the table (in a bar), it’s a close-up on their faces. And as you said, there is a comment about her face. I think many people have the experience of when they go to the country where they have roots, you look at the faces of people and I think there is always this question of, that could have been me. I can see that socially, body language, culturally, everything is so different, but the face is kind of similar. I wanted to (show) how this triggers a lot of different feelings about expectations, but also anger, frustration, 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 revelatory process. You find yourself in a puzzle, and then you get stuck by the question of legitimacy that writers ask themselves: “Why (am I telling) that story? What brought me there?” I’m not Korean or female, not an adoptee. Suddenly I understood that there was something (else): my personal experience since 2009, which is the first time that I lived in Cambodia.
Since then, I’ve been between the two countries, mostly in Cambodia for the last few years. A lot of my own experience is being between two cultures, being basically like Freddie. I was very self-assured about my French identity when I was 25, then arriving (in Cambodia) and people telling me, “No, you’re Cambodian.” And then taking 13 years to understand that things are maybe not as easy or simple or stable as we believe they are.
For me, it touches something about the truth of the human experience: What it means to ask yourself who you are and where you belong.
Read more from the International Film issue here.
