(Paris) Shortlisted among the 15 feature films first selected for the Oscars in the category of best international film, Davy Chou’s third feature film paints the portrait of a young woman who was adopted at a very young age by a French family. This return to the country of origin also finds an echo in the filmmaker’s own journey. Interview.
It all started in 2011, when Davy Chou was invited to present golden sleep, his first feature film, at the Busan festival in South Korea. When she learned the news, a friend with whom the filmmaker studied at university spontaneously offered to accompany her and show her “her country”.
“I was surprised, because she had never spoken to me about South Korea before, in the same way that I had never spoken to her about Cambodia”, explains Davy Chou during an interview granted to The Press during the Unifrance French Cinema Meetings.
A side story
It turns out, however, that this friend and he lived a parallel story of returning to their roots at the age of 25. During her first stay in South Korea, the young woman thought she would stay there for six months; she stayed there for two years. For his part, Davy Chou’s first stay in Cambodia was also to last six months beforehand. However, the filmmaker returned to France a year and a half later with, under his arm, a documentary film on the forgotten cinema of the country of his parents.
Having witnessed, once in Busan, a new “strange” encounter between his friend and the latter’s biological father, the one whose 2e feature film, Diamond Islandwas selected for Critics’ Week at the Cannes Film Festival in 2016, was able to draw inspiration from this story to write, 10 years later, Return to Seoul. We follow the journey of a 25-year-old French girl, born in South Korea, who returns for the very first time to her country of origin, where an unknown family lives.
PHOTO THOMAS FAVEL, PROVIDED BY METROPOLE FILMS
Scene from Return to Seoula film by Davy Chou
“There was so much anger on one side and regret on the other that any communication became impossible, even if there was no dramatic effect. It just felt. It was overwhelming,” recalls the filmmaker.
Willful blindness
Born in 1983 to Cambodian parents who came to study in France in the early 1970s, Davy Chou wrote his screenplay without really thinking about his own story, even though he too felt, in his twenties, the irrepressible urge to go visit his family’s country of origin.
“My parents came to France to continue their studies with the firm intention of returning to Cambodia afterwards – they were very young at the time – but fate decided otherwise. When the Khmer Rouge took over there, they lost virtually their entire family in the genocide. By force of circumstance, they stayed, making France their country from now on. »
I grew up in an environment where there was never any question of returning to Cambodia. Especially not. I was always given the very dark image of a country they had to flee. It was as if my parents were doing everything they could to take away my desire to go there. But when you double-lock a door, you always want to open it to see what’s behind it.
Davy Chou, director
PHOTO PATRICIA DE MELO MOREIRA, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE ARCHIVES
Park Ji-Min, interpreter of the main role of Return to Seouland Davy Chou in Cannes, last May
A kind of phenomenon of willful blindness ensured that Davy Chou saw only after the filming of Return to Seoul the parallels between the story told in his film and his own.
“I think I needed to get away from it to write and direct this film,” he points out. Otherwise, I would have found it too vulgar, too expected, too personal. And I wouldn’t have. We don’t even wonder if what we’re doing is going to please or not. We first make the film we want to make, hoping that it will have an echo. There, I see that Return to Seoul provokes a lot of emotion, a lot of feeling of recognition, in a world where we are today obsessed with questions of identity. »
Beware of the male bias
Return to Seoul is also built around the journey of a young woman named Freddie. His interpreter Park Ji-Min, a visual artist who is making her film debut here, has often warned the filmmaker about his masculine bias.
“Park Ji-Min jostled me from the rehearsal work by asking me to justify myself on the characterization of the character of Freddie, on his actions, practically at each scene, at each line. It wasn’t easy, but his questions were both beneficial and essential to building a real, complex character that wouldn’t just be a guy director’s fantasy. I am grateful to her for having been able to do this work of deconstruction with her. »
Return to Seoul hits theaters March 3.
Travel expenses were paid by Unifrance.