New drama Past Lives may be Celine Song's first movie, but she's no stranger to the director's chair. She's a playwright with an off-Broadway show under her belt – as well as a production of Chekhov's The Seagull recreated on The Sims 4 and broadcast on Twitch during the pandemic. "The transition was pretty direct and smooth," she tells us when we sit down together at Sundance London. "In theatre, something that you're working on every day is story, character, blocking, and dialogue, so those were things I could just pull over… I wanted to see if [filmmaking] was something that I was going to love, and I was so happy to learn that it is."
Past Lives opens in Seoul in 2000 with two 12-year-olds, Nora (Seung Ah Moon) and Hae Sung (Seung Min Yim). They're classmates, fast friends, and there's a hint of tweenage romance bubbling under the surface, too. Nothing comes to fruition, though, because Nora's life is thrown into flux when her family moves across the world to Toronto.
