Past Lives director draws on Asian-American immigrant experience of reuniting with her childhood love

SINGAPORE – It has been a banner year for Asian-American works.

From television series such as Beef (2023) and American-Born Chinese (2023), to

films like Joy Ride (2023)

and Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022), Asian-American content is only becoming more commercially and critically successful. 

Past Lives – which opens in Singapore cinemas on Thursday and is South Korean-Canadian director, playwright and screenwriter Celine Song’s directorial film debut – looks set to follow suit.

Since the romantic drama’s world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January, it has already won several awards – most recently, from the Hollywood Critics Association Midseason Film Awards for the best indie film, best screenplay and best actress (Greta Lee). On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, it has a 97 per cent critics score.

Starring South Korean-American actress Lee as Nora and South Korean-German actor Teo Yoo as Hae Sung, Past Lives follows their changing relationship through Nora’s emigration from South Korea to Toronto, Canada, and later, her move to New York.

It spans decades, starting from their childhood sweetheart bond in South Korea, to their long-distance reconnection over Skype in their early 20s and finally, more than a decade later, Hae Sung’s visit to New York to see Nora.

But their romantic potential is never quite realised. By that time, playwright Nora is married to a white American author, Arthur (John Magaro).

With an almost aching emotional acuity, Past Lives tells the simple, gutting tragedy of all the roads not taken, the lives not lived and love that never bloomed.

Song, who is in her early 30s and married to American playwright-novelist Justin Kuritzkes, describes this human condition as being like a doughnut.

The United States-based film-maker says in a Zoom interview in July: “You’re already formed with a little hole inside of you. My husband, when he fell in love, fell in love with the doughnut. And it’s not like I think about being a doughnut as a sad thing. It just makes me who I am, that’s my shape. And my partner, anybody’s partner who is loving somebody, has to love that person as that shape. And then, imagine the doughnut hole flying 12 hours to come visit.”

It is unsurprising that Song drew from her own experiences and emotions, rendering Past Lives almost semi-autobiographical.

Like her female protagonist, Song emigrated from South Korea at the age of 12 to Toronto, before moving to New York in her 20s. She had one day found herself sitting at a bar, sandwiched between her American husband and South Korean childhood sweetheart who had flown to New York to see her.

A mirror image of Song’s memory, the film opens with a third-party voiceover observing Hae Sung, Nora and Arthur sitting together at a bar in New York. And the connection that Nora develops with Hae Sung is, structurally, a carbon copy of what happened in Song’s life. 

“That was one of the easiest scenes for me to direct, because it was so specific, that feeling,” Song says.

But the experience of leaving a life behind while moving on to a new season is largely universal.

“Part of how the movie gets under your skin, is that you walk out thinking about your own life,” she says. “It doesn’t matter what country you’re from. People from all over the world can have a personal connection to this movie and it’s about what they’re going through.” 

Song contends that Nora’s story cannot be expected to stand in as a blanket for all Asian immigrant stories, but she believes in the value of simply offering one perspective out of many. 

She says: “It’s just always an exciting thing when there is room for all these other kinds of stories from the same community. I think that’s wonderful.”

Past Lives opens in cinemas on Thursday.