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"Return to Seoul" by Davy Chou, the favorite of the Cannes Film Festival 2022

Chi-Min Park in “Return to Seoul” by Davy Chou, presented at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. © Les Films du Losange

Text by: Siegfried Forster Follow

9 mins

This is the vibrant story of a young woman once adopted in Korea by French parents.

" 

 ", explains Davy Chou, 38, the approach to

, presented in the official selection of the Cannes Film Festival.

Chi-Min Park portrays the character of Freddie on the big screen.

A moment of grace.

Cross interview.

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Davy Chou was born in 1983 in Fontenay-aux-Roses, in the Paris region, but he embodies the hope of a revival of Cambodian cinema, with his very noticed films, but also in relation to his filiation as a grandson. of one of the greatest producers in the history of cinema in Cambodia, Van Chann.

For its lead actress, Chi-Min Park, this is her first role.

Born in Seoul, she arrived in Paris at the age of 8.

Today, she works there as a visual artist.

For

, she brings the character of Freddie to life with boundless energy, a veritable symphony of emotions and a beauty that is unaware of itself, but bursts onto the screen.

RFI

Davy Chou

[Laughs] I already had two films, a short film and a feature film at Critics' Week, which were shown in Cannes.

Obviously, it is more and more impressive.

The applause after the screening touched us enormously, the whole team.

When you make a film, you always hope to touch people.

It's a film with a difficult, complicated story, with a character who isn't easy either and whose tougher, angry, sometimes nasty facets are not hidden.

At the same time, he is a character that touches me deeply.

Every filmmaker hopes to touch people's hearts.

That loud applause, I guess, is because Freddie's character touched people's hearts.

So I also pay tribute to my actors and my crew, because what they gave in the film was received by the public.

You wrote and directed this scenario around this adopted child.

Who is Freddie

Davy Chou

Freddie is a young woman of 25 who was born in Korea and who was abandoned and then adopted in France.

She grew up in France.

The story begins when she returns, at the age of 25, for the first time to her country, the country where she was born, South Korea.

She leaves for two weeks on vacation, without ulterior motives, without ideas in her head, and especially not with the idea of ​​meeting her biological parents.

That's not what she's looking for at all.

However, after a few days, she finds herself face to face with her biological father and his family.

At this point, things take a rather surprising detour, and a little different from what is usually expected of a film about adoption.

We follow this character over several years.

You are a visual artist, you are not a professional actress.

How did you manage to understand the interior of the character Freddie

Chi-Min Park

I think I have a lot of similarities with the character.

Of what she has been through, of her story and of what she feels, her emotions.

So, I took hold of the character in the sense that it was really an encounter between the character written by Davy and my own experience, my own emotions and my own feelings.

In fact, it was very instinctive.

There were times when I didn't really have to play, it was a lot on instinct.

In your way of filming, you often stay very long on the face, as if you want to penetrate the secret that resides inside the protagonists.

What's the most surprising thing you've found inside Freddie and his biological father, the two key people in the story

Davy Chou

This film is quite different from my previous film,

, which was a bit like the painting of a society, of a youth [in Cambodia], at a given time.

There, it is really the portrait of a character.

The challenge for me was how to make viewers feel the infinitesimal emotional variations of a character.

A character who, moreover, goes through emotional extremes: from very great vulnerability to very great anger, sometimes to very great brutality and violence, and sometimes there is something very opaque and closed.

It is especially Chi-Min Park, who, by his generosity, gave me what I was looking for.

Sometimes you just had to put the camera on your face so that the viewer would have access to the interiority and the mystery of feelings.

I don't think it's very readable.

What surprised you the most about this encounter between yourself and the character of Freddie

Chi-Min Park

Tough question.

Many things surprised me.

For example, when I realized that there are similarities with this character, but it wasn't just these similarities that made me succeed in playing this character.

What surprised me the most was when I had that moment of "grace", the happy medium between the character and me.

When I realized that I was playing things!

And that I wasn't just me.

It was very strong.

There were times when I was like, oh, I'm playing!

When you went on stage before the screening of your film, you told us that the generosity of your actors, and in particular your actress, transformed you.

What sort of transformation have you experienced

Davy Chou

This role that I wrote is inspired by one of my best friends who lived this story, of the same kind as Freddie.

In 2011, I had the opportunity to accompany him, we met his biological father.

She had met him for the third time.

This is what inspired the film.

Afterwards, I wrote the film, somewhat inspired by her.

Then, we had to find the actress.

I found Chi-Min Park, who is an artist.

She is not an actress.

This is the first time she has acted in the cinema.

By talking with Chi-Min, by doing tests, very quickly, I knew that she could play everything, but it cost her a lot.

By not being an actress, by not having any training – the only way for her to act was to give 200% in each scene and to go deep into the inner emotions, without protecting herself,

without a net and jumping with both feet into the void.

That's really what I received, what the camera and the film received every day.

It's a huge gift she gave to me and to the film and to the character.

This is what we welcomed.

When I say that it transformed me, I am thinking of the many discussions that I had Chi-Min about his character Freddie, in relation to the script, his relationship to gender, to femininity, to male characters.

Sometimes she criticized me for filming things from my perspective as a male director, not having the experience of the character.

This is also what transformed me.

It's that exchange.

She also had this idea of ​​sometimes pushing me to move in relation to things in the character.

Without her, we could never have changed them.

In the film, the expression “ my native land ”

appears several times

Chi-Min Park

For me, it's Korea.

Since I am Korean.

I was born there, I lived there.

And I came to France when I was 8 or 9 years old.

So, my native land is Korea.

There's this scene where Freddie looks in the rear view mirror of the taxi where she sees her biological father.

In the film, we also learn that there were more than 200,000 Korean children adopted after the end of the Korean War in 1953. Do you have the feeling that cinema often remains in a one-way gaze and does not look at not enough in the rearview mirror to link the present of these adopted children with the past, the roots

Davy Chou

I think that the film about roots and the quest for roots is something we often hear about, it's something current.

On the contrary, we are often brought back to that.

Me, for example, at the age of 25, I went to Cambodia for the first time, the country where my parents were born.

A country I knew nothing about.

All my friends said to me: “ 

 ”.

I really rejected that and said, " 

 ".

People put my trip to Cambodia in a really predefined box.

On the contrary, I made the film in resistance to certain clichés of the trip back to basics.

With all that one can imagine of melancholy, nostalgia, self-revelation.

Things are much more complex, much more violent at times, complicated too and require much more time.

That's what interested me.

In the gaze of Freddie who looks at his father, probably for the last time, in the rearview mirror, there is something of a fundamental separation.

He says that this past that we might have hung up on, it can't be 'hanged up'.

It is rather the sadness of the impossibility sometimes to hang up.

And me, whose family history was turned upside down by the Khmer Rouge, and the fact that my parents left for France, and that a large part of our family died during the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge, it is something that I also feel very deeply.

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