The hidden gem of the skin: a visceral search for identity “in every man I will never be”

In 2011, French-Cambodian director Devi Chu was preparing to travel to the Buzan International Film Festival to screen his artistic debut. Golden dreamWhen one of your close friends called and said, “Are you going to South Korea? I’m going to you.”

The friend was a young woman, about Chow’s age, both in their 20s at the time, born in South Korea but adopted by a French couple and raised in Paris. Two days after his trip ended, he texted his Korean father and arranged a date, inviting Chow to miss.

“He said he had met twice before and it was no use. I said, “Sure, let’s go,” recalls Cho.

“The next day, I sat at the table with him, face to face with my father and grandmother, and I was shocked to see something I could never have imagined,” he says. “There were extremely difficult, very difficult and contradictory emotions as well as a language barrier. They come across this long broken history and suddenly they’re trying to reconnect, but it was obviously impossible. He adds, “It stuck in my mind like a dream for a possible movie.”

Eleven years later, a very similar scene is a turning point in Chow’s third feature film, All the people I will never be, premiered at Un Certain Regard at Cannes. The film tells the story of a 25-year-old woman named Freddie, first played by actor Ji Min Park, who returns to South Korea to explore her native country. Expressive, unpredictable, feminist and hilarious Freddie is the seeker, the living ray of half-cut humanity. The film moves between different time periods as she tries to come to terms with a deep cultural chasm and necessary loneliness, with her intercountry adoption experience, trying to establish a relationship with a Korean family that comes from a profoundly different world. They’ve also tried to choose different identities: delving into Seoul’s hedonistic underworld, buying and ditching a pure French lover, until briefly becoming a professional arms dealer, as chance encounters obviously last longer.

presence for All the people I will never be Chow faced significant challenges: his understanding of Korean culture was comprehensive, as was his adoption experience. He filled in those gaps by reading books, meeting Korean adoptive parents in Paris, and exchanging lengthy emails with a friend that sparked the story. Long, heartfelt conversations with his lead actor, Park, who he met in person and immediately felt shared the essence of Freddie’s free spirit, challenged some of his notions as a male director and helped him understand what a young French woman is like. It may respond to aspects of Korea’s highly patriarchal society. But when it comes to the character’s fundamental aspirations – a restless, youthful aspiration for identity and self-understanding – the director has found a fundamental connection within himself.

Chow was born in France to a family of Cambodian parents who fled to Paris shortly before the rise of the Khmer Rouge, during whose reign a terrorist regime killed most of his large family left behind. At age 25, she accompanied her parents on their first trip back to Cambodia, an emotionally intense journey that inspired her own journey to consider her homeland and culture. In the years that followed, Chow spent much of his time in Cambodia, assembling a youth-oriented film crew in Phnom Penh and directing his first two films there: Golden dream (2012), a documentary about the country’s lost film heritage and diamond island (2016), a compassionate drama about youth life in a rapidly modernizing enclave of the Cambodian capital, featuring all non-professional actors.

“There’s a personal connection to the story of this movie, but it wasn’t obvious to me at first, until I wrote it,” says Cho. “Because I’m not a woman, I’m not Korean and I’m not adopted.”

“But obviously there’s something I’m deeply connected to,” he adds, “which is a dual culture, a search for identity, and how traveling with your roots can affect your life forever, because there’s no going back.”