Return to Seoul Finds One’s Lost Identity

Release Date：Dec/2/2022

Genre：Drama

Director：Davy Chou

Cast：Park Ji-min、Oh Kwang-rok、Kim Sun-young

Viola's Rating：8.4

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences unveiled its shortlists for the 2023 Oscars in 10 categories on Dec 21, 2022. Out of the feature films from 92 countries and regions, 15 international films advanced, including Cambodia’s official Oscar submission Return to Seoul. French Cambodian director Davy Chou’s third feature film, Return to Seoul, was released limited on Dec 2, 2022 and is critically acclaimed.

Based on the real story of one of the director’s friends, the plot of Return to Seoul surrounds Freddie (Ji-Min Park), a twenty-five-year-old French woman, returning to South Korea for the very first time, the country she was born in before being adopted by a French couple. She decides to track down her biological parents, but her journey takes a surprising turn.

Like many Korean films related to adoption such as Champion, Home, Mothers and My Special Brothers, etc., Return to Seoul tells the facts that a bunch of Korean orphans were adopted by foreign parents during the Korean War. Kindred is very important in Korean family and society; therefore, it creates such special condition for adoptions. Even with a loving adopting family, being so different in another culture could be very difficult for the child growing up.

Because of the identity crisis, Freddie always hates her own birthday, and throughout Return to Seoul, Freddie has “celebrated” three birthdays, but the audience gets to see how Freddie’s emotion evolves on each birthday. Through the process of finding her biological parents, Freddie experiences another kind of coming-of-age journey in Seoul.

Koreans Freddie meets in Seoul tell her that she has typical Korean facial features, but she doesn’t know whether to be happy about it or not because she’s French. Meeting with biological relatives that she barely knows, Freddie doesn’t even know how to speak Korean, and her relatives’ passion and asking her to stay in Korea put a lot of pressure on her. While she’s still trying to figure out who she is, everyone around her keeps telling her to be a good Korean. She doesn’t fit in, and she doesn’t want to fit in.

Ji-Min Park, who played Freddie, wasn’t professional actress, but her performance was amazing. She conveyed Freddie’s emotions and brought her own deep empathy to the character to life. As Park’s debut, it was really a challenge to portray the character, but she did well and amazed moviegoers.

Return to Seoul is not an energetic, happy or vibrant flick, but it delicately depicts the life journey of a confused Korean French girl, and how she finds her lost identity back returning to her birth country, the close yet distant Seoul.

Picture Credit: Rotten Tomatoes