How a South Korean-Canadian director’s debut Past Lives became this year’s most acclaimed film

Yes, she will be presenting her directorial debut in person as a guest of the Whānau Marama: New Zealand International Film Festival. But some of the most affecting scenes in her quietly heart-aching love story, which traverses continents, decades, and the Korean concept of inyeon from which the film gets its title, are conversations between two people on Skype.

On one side of the calls is Canadian-Korean New Yorker Na Young/Nora (Greta Lee). On the other is her one-time sweetheart from her childhood in Seoul, Hae Sung (Teo Yoo). They haven’t seen each other nor been in touch since Nora’s family crossed the Pacific 12 years earlier and she Anglicised her name.

At first, seeing each other in their mid-twenties for the first time, the pair can’t manage much more than “woah”. But their Skype calls become a regular thing, their long chats punctuated by the glitches of early video-call technology.

It might seem a simple scene to bring off. Just film one side of the conversation and then the other. But Song insisted on doing it practically, though without her characters in different time zones, just different rooms. She had the crew rig up a throttle between the two computers that allowed her to screw up the connection without warning the actors.

“We really tried to recreate what it was like to do Skype at that time. Which is that it was crappy.

“But it’s also about what’s amazing about technology – when Nora and Hae Sung first see each other over Skype, it’s like a sci-fi miracle … and they are so thankful for the technology, but over time they become more intimate, and they want to get closer and to touch each other, and the technology goes from being a miracle to being frustrating.”

Song is also Canadian-Korean. She studied and now lives in New York, where her career as a playwright has inched towards the screen. She’s been a writer on the Amazon Prime fantasy series Wheel of Time.

Past Lives is a world away from that show. It’s based on her own experience. She too left a childhood sweetheart in Korea after her family shifted, and reconnected with him later, platonically. In the film, her Nora character doesn’t encounter Hae Sung in person for another 12 years after the Skype fling and she’s since married a US fellow writer.

Song says the idea for the film came when she was in an East Village bar with her husband and her former beau and was translating between them. This is a scene replicated at the film’s start and near its end with Hae Sung, Nora and husband Arthur, in which fellow patrons can be heard trying to figure out what the relationship is between the trio.