From the outside, you’d be excused for thinking Celine Song’s debut film might be a memoir of sorts. Like Nora, the lead character, Song left South Korea for Canada as a young girl. Like Nora, she also has two successful artists for parents, an illustrator and filmmaker, and moved to New York to pursue a career as a writer.
And just like the opening scene of her film, Song also once found herself sitting between her husband, who is white, and childhood sweetheart, who is Korean, in a bar in the East Village. She was translating for each of them, two men from different income levels, different languages and different cultural backgrounds: “These two people who had no reason to meet each other, let alone try to get to know each other,” she said.
That was the moment Past Lives first took shape.
“I was looking around the bar that night and I saw the people in the bar looking at us, trying to figure out who we were to each other,” Song told CBC News. “So I think the first thought I had was like, ‘Oh, wouldn’t you like to know who we are to each other?’ And then the second thought I had was, ‘OK, well, what if I actually took the time in the movie to tell you the answer to that question?'”
From that question grew what she describes as a mystery in the form of a romance, a story about a woman navigating feelings for an old flame she reconnected with over Skype, and the man she eventually married.
The achievement is already evident. As her first-ever film, Past Lives debuted at Sundance, then moved on to Berlinale — where a film her father Song Neung-han co-wrote, The Taebaek Mountains, played back in 1995. There, Past Lives has already been hailed as one of the best movies of the year, though Song says she had much humbler aspirations — and they weren’t about showcasing her own life story.
“I felt like it felt really important to tell the story of ordinary people that are able to do something pretty extraordinary,” Song explained.
A playwright by trade, Song explained she’s most compelled to try things that push the boundaries and introduce something new. Whether that be her rendition of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull staged in the game Sims 4, or working as a writer on Amazon’s wildly ambitious The Wheel of Time, her work tries to challenge the medium she’s working in — as well as the audience.
In Past Lives, she took a different tack. While the story draws from her experience, it exists as a challenge to show how the seeming mundanity of everyday life is infused with meaning. And as the film opens up to wider audiences, she says she can only hope they’re willing to give it a chance.
“I want there to be kind of openness to that, and what I hope is that at the end of this film, when you’re walking out, I want it to have gotten under your skin so that it feels as personal to them as it did to me making the movie,” she said. “I want this story to feel like it’s one of their own.”
Past Lives releases in the U.S. June 2, and will begin its theatrical run in Toronto on June 9 before opening in more theatres across the country.
