The movie

Return to Seoul

A twenty-five-year-old French woman returns to Korea, the country she was born in before being adopted by a French couple, for the very first time. She decides to track down her biological parents, but her journey takes a surprising turn.

Length: 117 min
Country: Belgium, Germany, France
Language spoken: French, English, Korean
Language subtitles: Dutch
Cast: Louis-Do de Lencquesaing, Oh Kwang-Rok, Guka Han, Yoann ZimmerPark Ji-min, Kim Sun-young
Director: Davy Chou
Release date: 2022

Description

Frédérique (the astounding Park Ji-min)—'Freddie’ to pretty much everyone—is South Korean by birth, but only speaks French, having been adopted as a baby by a couple living in the French countryside. In Seoul by accident after a typhoon forces her plane to land there, she haphazardly begins a search for her birth mother. Along the way, Cambodian-French director Davy Chou turns her odyssey into a search for self. He has made, in the words of ‘Rolling Stone’ magazine, ‘one of the best movies about identity crises ever…’

‘“Return to Seoul” is a funny, melancholy film that will surprise you start to finish… With its shifting palette and attentive eye, Chou's style respects [his heroine’s] unruliness. Rather than weave itself into a tidy narrative complete with tailor-made epiphanies, “Return to Seoul” lurches through eight years in a series of sharp, unpredictable episodes… I was held rapt by Park's bristling performance as Freddie, one made all the more astonishing because she's never acted before. Wow, does she have presence!’—John Powers, NPR