One night, writer-director Celine Song found herself in an East Village bar in New York. On one side of her sat her husband, on the other her childhood sweetheart from Korea.
As she translated the words between the two, she realized she was translating between two versions of her own life: what she had chosen and what might have been; her Korean self and her American self.
Past Lives, Song’s debut feature, features a reconstruction of that very scene. Greta Lee stars as Nora, a happily married New Yorker who is visited by Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), the boy she loved as a child in Seoul.
While Nora’s is a specifically immigrant story, about those two identities, as well as two possible lives, the theme is universal.
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