Born in Korea but raised by her adoptive parents in France, 25-year-old Freddie is at an uncertain time in her life when she impulsively travels to her birth country to reconnect with her origins. The headstrong young woman starts looking for her biological parents in a country she knows so little about, taking her life in new and unexpected directions. She discovers there’s an agency that works to connect adopted children with their biological parents. Mere days later, Freddie meets her birth father. However, she quickly discovers her own crisis of identity won’t be so easily resolved…
Following Freddie during several different visits to Korea over the course of a decade, Davy Chou’s Return to Seoul is a fiercely intelligent film about the messiness of identity and the uncertainty of what ‘home’ means. It’s anchored by remarkably raw yet nuanced work by Park Ji-min in her extraordinary debut screen performance.
Festivals & awards
15th Asia Pacific Screen Awards 2022 – Best Director (Davy Chou) and Best New Performance (Park Ji-min)
Belfast Film Festival, 2022 – Best Film
Athens International Film Festival, 2022 – Golden Athena / Best Film award
“Return to Seoul is a startling and uneasy wonder, a film that feels like a beautiful sketch of a tornado headed directly toward your house” – The New York Times
“Park Ji-min’s… debut performance [is] so piercing it makes the entire film move like a breathing poem” – Vulture
