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Return to Seoul (French: Retour à Séoul) or All The People I’ll Never Be is a 2022 drama film directed and written by Davy Chou. A French-German-Belgian coproduction, the film revolves around Freddie (Ji-Min Park), a 25-year old French adoptee, who goes to South Korea to find her biological family. The film premiered on 22 May at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival under the Un Certain Regard section.

Return to Seoul
Cannes poster
French	Retour à Séoul
Directed by	Davy Chou
Screenplay by	Davy Chou
Produced by	Katia Khazak Charlotte Vincent
Starring	Ji-Min Park Oh Kwang-rok Guka Han Kim Sun-young
Cinematography	Thomas Favel
Edited by	Dounia Sichov
Release date	22 May 2022 (2022-05-22) (Cannes)
Running time	116 minutes[1]
Countries	France Belgium Germany Cambodia Qatar
Languages	French Korean English

Premise

"The pic centers on 25-year-old Freddie, who impulsively returns to South Korea for the first time, where she was born before being adopted and raised in France. 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."[2]

Cast

Production

Director Davy Chou got the idea for the film from a similar experience with his friend, also a French woman in her 20s adopted from South Korean biological parents, who traveled with him to South Korea during the filming of his 2011 film Golden Slumbers to meet her biological father and grandmother for the first time. Seeing how emotional their meeting was, he decided to make a film on similar lines. Not knowledgeable in Korean culture or the experience of adoption at first, he researched these elements by talking to his friend and other adoptees as well as reading books, identifying some similarities with his own life as the son of immigrants from Cambodia who had left the country before the Khmer Rouge took over. Chou met Ji-Min Park through a "personal introduction" and decided to cast her as Freddie, her first film role, as he saw her as someone who "shared the essence of Freddie’s free-spiritedness". He further developed her characterization through conversations with Park, which "challenged some of his notions as a male director and helped him understand how a young French woman might respond to aspects of Korea’s highly patriarchal society."[3] Filming took place over six weeks in late 2021 in South Korea and Romania.[4]

Release

The film was first shown at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival on 22 May under the English title All The People I’ll Never Be in the Un Certain Regard section. Shortly before it was shown, MUBI and Sony Pictures Classics acquired the distribution rights to the film in different regions, with Sony Pictures Classics changing the film's English title to Return to Seoul.[2][5]

Reception

On the review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, Return to Seoul holds an approval rating of 96% based on 25 reviews from critics, with an average rating of 7.80/10.[6]

References

External links

• Return to Seoul at IMDb

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