Playwright-Turned-Director Celine Song on Her Past Life’s Influence on ‘Past Lives’
variety.comJessica Kiang It is not unprecedented to have a Sundance-premiering film play in the Berlinale competition. Yet director Celine Song’s journey with “Past Lives,” which received raves in Park City and makes its international bow in Berlin, feels like a fresh phenomenon.
She’s a first-time filmmaker. Her movie has no big names. And it is unapologetically personal. Breakthrough status suits Song, who told Variety, “Everything I do, I have to believe it is the first time I’m doing that kind of thing.” Her recent resumé bears that out: Since her Off Broadway play “Endlings” closed early due to the pandemic, she has written for Amazon’s “The Wheel of Time” and mounted a production of Chekhov’s “The Seagull” entirely within the Sims 4 universe on Twitch.
So “Past Lives” feels gorgeously new, but it’s also involved in evergreen ideas about love and fate. Tracing the decades-spanning, continents-bridging connection between childhood sweethearts Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), it is inextricably informed by Song’s own life.
She, like Nora, is a playwright who emigrated from Korea to Canada as a kid, and now lives in New York with her American writer husband.
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